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This is my translation. El tunel, Ernesto Sabato (Seix Barral, 1948):

"My theory," he explained, "is as follows: in the 20th century, the political novel
represents what the chivalry novel did in Cervantes’s time. Moreover: I think
you could make something equivalent to Don Quixote: a satire of political novels.
Imagine an individual who has passed his life . . . continue reading Friday Quotes

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From Jorge Luis Borges’s "Prologue" to The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (University of Texas Press, 1964; republished by NYRB Classics, 2003):

There are pages, there are chapters in Marcel Proust that are unacceptable as inventions, and we unwittingly resign ourselves to them as we resign ourselves to the . . . continue reading Friday Quotes

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Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, (London, 1972), p. 173 as quoted in Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, (Chicago, 1974) p. 13:

Perhaps it was our common sense of fun that first brought about our understanding. The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or . . . continue reading Friday Quotes

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Via Alex Ross:

Al Pacino on the subject of playing Michael Corleone in The Godfather: "…the thing that I was after was to create some kind of enigma…. You see Michael in some of those scenes wrapped up in a kind of trance, as if his mind were completely filled with thoughts; that’s what I . . . continue reading Friday Quotes

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Excerpted from the Harper’s Index from the June 2007 issue of Harper’s.

Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000

Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000

Number that sold more than 100,000: 483

The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross (FSG, 2007). pg. 246.

Besieged Leningrad . . . continue reading Friday Quotes

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Leonid Grossman, as quoted in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. M.M. Bakhtin (University of Minnesota, 1984), pp. 41-2:

Dostoevsky himself pointed out this compositional vehicle [of a musical type--M.B.] and once drew an analogy between his structural system and the musical theory of "modulations" or counter-positions. He was writing at the time a short novel of . . . continue reading Friday Quotes

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Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982), pg. 217:

One essential difference exists between the Proustian and the Joycean methods of approaching their characters. Joyce takes a complete and absolute character, od-known, Joyce-known, then breaks it up into fragments and scatters these fragments over the space-time of his book. The good rereader gathers . . . continue reading Friday Quotes

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The Irresponsible Self by James Wood (Picador, 2005), pg. 27:

It is a shame that many readers never get to [Don Quixote's] stupendous second book, which is both funnier and more affecting than its first. A rough analysis of the action in the second book might go like this: Jesus Christ is wandering around first-century . . . continue reading Friday Quotes

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The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth, footnote to page 301:

Finnegans Wake (Compass Books ed., 1959), pp. 534, 542. The novel was first published in 1939, though fragments of Work in Progress appeared throughout the preceding decade. If I dropped the point here I could no doubt leave some readers convinced that I have read . . . continue reading Friday Quotes