Kevin Guilfoile > Quotes

“A good critic is trying to tell you what she has learned about herself from the reading of a particular piece of literature. A bad reviewer is often trying to tell you how smart he is by declaring whether or not he liked a particular book. If he liked the book, then this is the kind of book a superior person likes, and vice versa. He might try to explain why he didn’t like it, but the review is really just a tautology. “I didn’t like this book because it is bad,” is equivalent to “This book is bad because I didn’t like it.”
― Kevin Guilfoile

“Then I realized that I was falling victim to one of the fallacies of the bad reviewer (whose habits we already discussed at length in yesterday’s commentary). I was wishing that Hamid had written a different book than he had. How I might have written this story is completely irrelevant. It would be like dismissing The Godfather because I wished it were a musical. The novel needs to be considered on its own terms.”
― Kevin Guilfoile

“The problem with history is that every story has multiple witnesses, but no witness ever has the entire truth.”
― Kevin Guilfoile, A Drive into the Gap

“Barry wasn’t the kind of jerk who was nice to people only when he needed something from them. As far as I could tell, Barry was pretty much an ass to everybody all the time.”
― Kevin Guilfoile, A Drive into the Gap

“Grief is born. Grief matures. Grief passes. Despair, on the other hand, which arrives in an instant, ferments into depression. And although depression was months away, at least, already he felt himself not caring.”
― Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows

“Numbers were originally abstractions, invented just to quantify things, to count rocks or people or grapes or whatever. The fact that dust floating in the air & the price of stock options behave according to the same mathematical principles, the fact that everything in the universe apparently can be described or predicted with a mathematical equation-a radical idea when Pythagoras suggested it- is probably the most startling coincidence in the history of mankind.”
― Kevin Guilfoile, The Thousand

“Time is the thing that keeps everything from happening all at once.”
― Kevin Guilfoile, A Drive into the Gap

“On some level, most novelists write fiction to create order out of chaos. When you shape a fictional story, you can tie every loose end, fit the round pegs comfortably in circular holes. In a novel the author can create a world that makes sense.”
― Kevin Guilfoile, A Drive into the Gap

“I don’t think it’s ever fair for a reader to criticize an author for writing the book the novelist wanted to write, as opposed to the book the reader wished he had written.”
― Kevin Guilfoile