Quotes About Vivian Gornick

The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

V S Naipaul] brings to [literary narrative] an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought. Observe hard, think even harder, figure out what you are thinking in the simplest, clearest language, and you will arrive at narrative: that is his credo.