Joanna Scott

“There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure.”

“When we read about reading, we get to share an experience that is usually kept private. Incisive descriptions of reading help us to understand what is going on when our eyes move across words on the page.”

“The past is full of examples of renegade writers who were overlooked in their time not only because their work didn't fit neatly into potted categories but also because they avoided the self-promotional efforts of their peers.”

“With prurient absorption and only minimal risk, we can pretend to be the subject of the lead article on the front page of the Style section of our local newspaper for as long as it takes to finish our morning coffee.”

“The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.”

“Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.”

“My first two books, I was very close to my main character, stuck inside their head. And then with 'Arrogance,' I broke into many different voices. I introduce many different characters, and that helped me to develop a confidence to move between different characters, between different voices.”

“Complex literary works demand an effort from the reader that is becoming harder to justify, given the sink-or-swim pressures to make profitable products for a global marketplace.”

“When we really start searching for the truth in stories, we can find it everywhere, not just in sincere confessions but in the deliberate lies and imagined possibilities, the magic and fantasy, and all the other unreal elements that go into the concoction of identity.”

“As children know, there's lots of fun in nonsense. We never stop benefiting from staying flexible, open and responsive, even in the midst of confusion.”

“How wonderful it would be to scatter words as they rise to consciousness, to let them lie where they fall.”

“I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.”

“If the rules of a language are followed, words usually make sense. But these very rules can stir the impulse to rebel. We're obliged to keep trying to convey meaning through correct sentences. After a while, the good-soldier rigidity of polished prose can begin to seem dull, and it gets harder to resist the temptation of nonsense.”

“The best liars lie with their eyes rather than with their words. This might put writers at a disadvantage.”

“While it can be pleasurable to move speedily through a work of fiction, there's a different sort of pleasure to be had in lingering, backtracking, rereading the same page.”

“'Out of Africa,' Dinesen's second book, is a love story, though not the one portrayed by Streep and Redford in the film. The memoir is about Dinesen's love of East Africa - the cultures, the landscapes, the animals. The feeling that saturates the book is reverence.”

“In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency.”

“Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.”

“Masks are wonderfully paradoxical in this way: while they may hide the physical reality, they can show us how a person wants to be seen.”

“There's a point I set for myself, and it's an arbitrary point, when I think no matter happens, I'm going to finish that book. And that's when I get to page 100. I have to see it out.”