Lance Olsen > Quotes

“For the last fifty years or so, The Novel’s demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can’t in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language—especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end?”
― Lance Olsen

“For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.”
― Lance Olsen

“Education isn’t something your professors make for you. It’s something you make for yourself.”
― Lance Olsen, Rebel Yell: A Short Guide to Fiction Writing

“I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books.”
― Lance Olsen, Theories of Forgetting

“All this seeing.
All this relentless taking in.”
― Lance Olsen, Theories of Forgetting

“Everything changes, sweetheart. The universe loves to happen.”
― Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets