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Ben Dolnick Quotes


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Quotes by Ben Dolnick

Showing 21-30 of 39 Quotes by Ben Dolnick

Upon reading the deeply serious opening of Scott Spencer's 'Endless Love', you will very likely laugh out loud. The tone is something like what you might find in a teenager's diary: verbose, feverish, furiously self-important.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Deeply Diary Endless Find Laugh Like Likely Loud Love Love You Might Opening Out Reading Scott Serious Something Spencer Teenager Tone Very Will You

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In the Children's Zoo, Enrichment meant presenting the goats with a trash can smeared with peanut butter or dangling keys at the end of a broomstick in front of the cow. The goats would knock their heads around the inside of the can and emerge giddy, peanut butter drunk.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Around Butter Children Cow Drunk Emerge End Enrichment Front Giddy Goats Heads Inside Keys Knock Meant Peanut Peanut Butter Presenting Trash Would Zoo

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To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Book Chosen Doing Else Exactly Fiction Habits Over Right Someone Subject Think Work Write Written Wrong You Your

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One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Been Career Doing Make More Ought Outline Says Stop Throughout Voices

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The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: His Me Patron Rock Saint Sings Siren Who

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During the couple of years it took to write 'At The Bottom of Everything', I decided, on the sort of hopeful whim that occasionally overtakes me, to sign up for piano lessons.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Bottom Couple Decided Everything Hopeful Lessons Me Occasionally Piano Piano Lessons Sign Sort Took Up Whim Write Years

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To learn a piece on the piano - even a simple one - has proved every bit as agonizing as writing a chapter in a book, every bit as tedious and hopeless and halting. But this is not to say that the piano hasn't helped my writing. It has, just not in the ways I expected.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Bit Book Chapter Even Every Expected Helped Hopeless Just Learn Piano Piece Proved Say Simple Tedious Ways Writing

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For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Always Been Challenge Contains Desert Eventually Feeling Foot Front Gloomy Lost Make Me Misguided Months Myself Nature Other Out Setting Way Will

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I will never, most likely, be good at the piano, but thanks to it, I will never forget the humbling, infuriating, necessary slowness of progress in any artistic endeavor.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Any Artistic Endeavor Forget Good Humbling Likely Most Necessary Never Never Forget Piano Progress Thanks Will

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Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.

~Ben Dolnick

Topics: Dubious Giving Literature Merely Out Positively Prizes Seem Those Which

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Writer

Born: Unknown

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Find Ben Dolnick on Amazon

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