Quotes from Stanley Elkin

When I was growing up, we had a bungalow in New Jersey which we visited in the summers. Everybody in that small community was named Feldman and was either an aunt or cousin of mine. I just found it comfortable to use the name Feldman.

Plot is to literature what individual holes are to miniature golf.

Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does.

I've always been terrified of dying, always. It was a concern of mine long before it had to be.

I don't believe less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.

It's like everything else. The price of Torahs is higher in Alaska.

Even the sky a hybrid — here clean and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.

Because all books ARE the Book of Job -- man in the crucible like Jack in the Box....

Not just the celibacy thing but because he has God's ear, a line on the mysteries. That's impressive to girls.

The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first. -Description of Doomsday

Because I never found My audience, said God and annihilated, as Mother Mary and Christ and Lesefario and Flanoy and Quiz in their Y.M.C.A. seafront room in Piraeus and all Hell's troubled sighed, everything.

I say "every so often" but it's more frequent than that.

I do not do schtick. What I do are organized routines and connected schtick— schtick upon schtick upon schtick until we have a piece of carpentry

The same thing that gives us wisdom gives us plaque.

Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism.

What a writer's message is is totally unimportant. Either he is agreeing with life by affirming, or he is saying life is just a bowl of wormwood.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

It's fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor management of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads.

The fact that we die is one of the more interesting things that happen to us. Fiction ought to be about bottom lines, and that's as bottom-line as you can get.

But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

The peculiar dignity of men seen eating alone in restaurants on national holidays

The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first.-Description of Doomsday