Top 50 Michelle Dean Quotes

The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn’s, in the dust.

When a woman shouts, she isn’t usually praised for it. She’s condemned as aggressive and coarse.

Most people do not pay attention to the publisher’s imprint on a given book.

I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument. This, I know,, is not how everyone does it.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

Book awards – in America, at least – are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book.

The ‘World Wide Web’, as people quaintly called the Internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards.

While ‘Twilight”s popularity was undeniable among both the teenagers they were aimed at and middle-aged women who flocked to the series in droves, Meyer has drawn her share of criticism for her writing. Some feminist critics assailed what they saw as Bella’s mooning over her vampire lover.

I could be imagining it, but I believe myself to have exchanged sly, understanding nods with other people I see attending movies alone on Christmas Day.

The phenomenon of Instagram poets – who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets – has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age.

Mary Roach’s curiosity is notoriously infectious.

Research can be a boon to a novelist – there are more things in heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in a single writer’s philosophy – or it can become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down the storytelling.

When Paul Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’ was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily ‘New York Times’ and one in the weekly ‘New York Times Book Review,’ too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book.

There are, of course, fat characters in books out there, some of them quite enduring and famous. But they tend to be creatures of young-adult or commercial fiction.

Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life.

Among journalists, there is a saying: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ This can result in some serious hustling – and some serious sloppiness – whenever a crime occurs. The public’s longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.

Dan Brown and the ‘Da Vinci Code’ have been around well over a decade now, and to be perfectly honest, both he and it have become a joke.

We are reminded repeatedly, often by older men, that western civilization has died on the altar of social media.

My parents and I – I’m an only child – are not particularly religious, but I was christened and raised in that vague and characteristically Canadian form of Protestantism known as the United Church.

Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form of virtue.

Indeed, there has never been any sort of organised movement of people who take their cats into the outdoors. Of course, the navy often took them on ships, but there they performed a function, mousing for the officers.

A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives.

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she’s brought to evaluate.

There’s no good way to be the center of a media maelstrom you did not choose for yourself.

Articulateness is not the only way that intelligence manifests itself.

Bad criticism recites rote arguments. The shame of rote arguments isn’t just that they’re cliches, though they are, but that they tend to hide from us why a critic is actually thinking what they’re thinking.

Few reporters get to do what Kelly McEvers does in every episode of ‘Embedded’: go deep into a story and tease out what is really happening.

Television was not cool among the young people of my era, the last years of the ’90s and the early ’00s. It was not just old people who’d castigate you for watching anything but public television. We young people scoffed at each other about it.

Hollywood versions of watershed moments in American history are generally high-minded shlock. ‘JFK,’ ‘The People vs. Larry Flynt,’ even ‘Lincoln’: all of these boast excellent performances in scripts that are ultimately very conventional, even conservative.

‘Millennials’ has become a kind of modern swearword, a slur directed at people in their early 20s.

There are many things to like about ‘Mr. Robot,’ the most ephemeral and yet memorable of them being the opening credits.

Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs.

The first thing I remember feeling about the 2016 U.S. election was a kind of speechlessness.

Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.

Many people, I’ve noticed by informally polling friends, are prone to distinguishing a beach read by genre. Some people thought all thrillers are beach reads; others thought all romances are. Some people thought only mass market paperbacks are eligible for beach read standards.

There is something a little vulgar about writing a novel that is too close to the present, too concerned with current events, too eager to critique technological advancements.

People spend their entire lives trying to construct something to grab onto: a family, a home, a business. Rarely does anyone seem to manage to get much ground under their feet.

I read almost no romantic fiction, in part because I barely believe in romance in the age of Tinder.

If you care about a subject, there’s a podcast for it.

Donald Trump is a man who likes to think he has few equals.

The real discovery of having your consciousness raised was never that you’d be handed tools; it was the discovery that the only real leverage you get in life is yourself.

Poems are ideally suited, in some ways, to social media because they pack so much meaning into so little language.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish – or read – books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction.

Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.

A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts.

Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it’s a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone’s garage.

I like debate and argument, so I’m usually all right with disagreement, and I’m even all right if the critic doesn’t come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.

The podcast revolution has taught us that women’s voices aren’t just pleasurable to listen to, they are essential.

I have deliberately arranged my life so that I see pictures of cute animals on the Internet every day.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.