Ben Dolnick

“When I started researching the eco effects of eating meat, I'd assumed, for no good reason, that environmental irresponsibility would correspond to both animal size and deliciousness: Eating cows would be worst, eating pigs would be a bit less bad, and eating chickens would be basically harmless.”

“True atonement isn't the periodic shaving of karmic stubble via confessional; it requires deep, truthful change. It means doing the hardest thing of all: not making the same stupid mistake again.”

“We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.”

“Every morning as I begin my work day, my computer presents me with the usual array of garbage: email, Twitter, updates on the state of the nation, updates on the state of the sneakers I just ordered.”

“To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.”

“People often talk about the characters in books as if they were considering whom to invite to a dinner party. 'Oh, I just hated her - she was so mean.' 'He's a bully; I didn't like how he treated his mother.'”

“A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.”

“I've sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.”

“Enrichment happened to be my favorite time of day in the Children's Zoo, since it offered relief from the security-guard-esque standing around that makes up most of a zookeeper's day.”

“Upon reading the deeply serious opening of Scott Spencer's 'Endless Love', you will very likely laugh out loud. The tone is something like what you might find in a teenager's diary: verbose, feverish, furiously self-important.”

“Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.”

“One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline.”

“Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.”

“Philip Roth has made a cottage industry of unlikable characters, but compared with Mickey Sabbath, the furious and profane protagonist of 'Sabbath's Theater,' Roth's earlier creations seem like Winnie the Pooh.”

“I would love to love Saul Bellow, but by page fifty of 'Herzog', something within me has wandered into another room.”

“I had a slight feeling of babysitting as we walked soberly along together using all our old phrases, making all our old jokes, not quite feeling all our old fondness.”

“When I first read 'At Freddie's', I was struggling with my own writing, particularly with how to write about a sad subject - the death of a parent - without writing an entirely sad book.”

“The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.”

“Oberst is one of those musicians that some people hate in a visceral, biological way.”

“'At Freddie's' takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you feel sorry for the people who have to write summaries on the backs of books.”