“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. It makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel. Total loss of all basic motor skills, blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - the mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting, because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.” MenWorldWayMindLossInterestingVisionWatchesNovelBalanceTerribleHorrorSkillsDepthCommunicateTongueBehaveVillageHelplessMotorVegasLas VegasColumnsIrresponsibleNumbLoathingDrunkardsDepravedBingeFear And LoathingRecoil Author:Hunter S. Thompson
“Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.” FeelsFormValuesNovelBalanceConcernedFundamentalsWineDryNeverthelessSentimentalGrocers Book:The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews Source: The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews
“The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.” FeelsStoriesJobsFormNovelGraceBalanceProveWitManageShort StoryElegantSnapsBrazilFeatsSlyLoosenessPicaresque Author:Lauren Groff
“Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.” NovelBalanceMoralityScalesNovelistsThumbsTremblingImmoralityInstability Book:Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.” ThinkingRealFictionNovelBalanceReal LifeConfusionRhythmRescue Author:Don DeLillo
“A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.” ThinkingDifficultNovelAchieveBalanceEternalContemporary Author:Salman Rushdie