Carlo Rotella > Quotes

“Hard work is much more important than talent”
― Carlo Rotella

“I’m allergic to abstraction. Especially in my first two books, I was telling the story of the transformation of urban America, especially in the so-called “rust belt,” and of the decline of the industrial city and the rise of post-industrialism. But I could only tell it as a series of locally inflected stories about particular characters at particular moments in particular landscapes. They are almost always creative characters: Writers, or musicians. These characters are often filled with some urge, and I am basically writing the biography of that urge. How does the urge to play the guitar find expression in certain styles, which are attached to certain institutions, and then to the city?

(Source: article discusses "The Art of Storytelling" in The European.)”
― Carlo Rotella

“Literature offer is not only a bottomless repository of ideas—inspiring, awful, useful, funny, hateful, perplexing, terrifying, thrilling, generative, ever-multiplying ideas about how to live and what’s out there in the world and other such essential matters— but also endless opportunities to refine your analytical chops in an encounter with some of the most complex artifacts our species is capable of producing.”
― Carlo Rotella, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics

“What kind of reader does this book want me to be?" is useful precisely because it helps you find your way to meaning even when you dislike or hate or are outraged by a book.”
― Carlo Rotella, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics