Anis Shivani > Quotes

“Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.”
― Anis Shivani

“What deserves my loyalty, art or prestige?”
― Anis Shivani

“The mythic agony that interests me is the doomed struggle of the human to buy time from mortality, the falseness of all constructions of the human, the illusions of history and the made-up history of individualism. What interests me is the impossible nature of time and space, man warring against nature and against the cruelty of civilization, and the gods humanity needs to wrestle down to size as we struggle against self-created deficits.”
― Anis Shivani

“Of all the things I could have ended up doing, in pursuit of the most honest, I ended up in the most corrupt business around in the United States: writing. The most corrupt because in this country the least is at stake. I feel like I know a little of what it must have felt like to be a writer in the Stalinist thirties, during the purges, during the heyday of socialist realism. I’m living the past as the future, when I thought I was going to find my way to the actual future.

But given this pervasive corruption, what can you do? I’ve stressed one point again and again, which is, community based on equality, not insecurity and desperate yearning to be recognized. The way to real community might ironically be to give in to behaviors which seem to be its antithesis. One always has the choice to end the waste of time implicated in mutual flattery, which halts the progress of one’s art, and instead congregate around an aesthetic vision among equals, by creating a press, or starting a journal or reading series, or simply getting together to talk about writing.”
― Anis Shivani

“Contemporary American fiction has become cheap counseling to the bereaved bourgeois.”
― Anis Shivani

“The adults prove themselves to be children when they treat criticism as a virus to be exterminated.”
― Anis Shivani

“Whenever content is vacated in any art form, nostalgia (or sentimentalism) in some form seems to take over.”
― Anis Shivani

“So, try to figure out a way to exit your role in the capitalist representation of the writer and his function in the literary community. The events you ritualistically attend and the collaborations you’re expected to be part of, are they good for your soul? If they deaden you, exit. If you feel a weakening of the spirit, exit from anything they call literary community. You’ll be better off alone. In other words you have to find yourself first.”
― Anis Shivani

“Strict realism seems to me a dead-end today in denuding the myths we live by. The obsession with the particular can be carried so far as an aesthetic principle that it becomes a tyranny.”
― Anis Shivani

“If we don't understand bad writing, we can't understand good writing. Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance. Good writing is exactly the opposite. Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself.”
― Anis Shivani

“. . . stop being part of the social norms of writing and teaching, which then leads to the point, stop being a capitalist person, one who works for a salary to teach writing in a form that’s acceptable to capitalism, which then leads further to the point, exit social norms imposed upon you, do not have a lifestyle that requires living by capitalist rules even outside the teaching and practice of writing—which ultimately is the only way to a real literary community, which is based on real art, and you see how impossible a track I’m on?”
― Anis Shivani

“More than a decade after the first strong signals of the collapse (or at least the twilight) of the American empire, there is yet to be a melancholic reckoning with the decline of empire; this is astonishing in comparison with the historical record in Britain, where, either allegorically or directly, the end of empire was a major preoccupation of twentieth-century fiction.”
― Anis Shivani