Jess Walter Quotes

I'm thinking my next book should be set on a tropical island, which will obviously require days, even weeks of meticulous research, but I'm prepared to make that sacrifice. That's just the sort of dedicated writer I am.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

It is difficult not to write satire.

I like to write a lot of satire.

The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Satire is focused bitterness.

Social satire has been around since people have been around.

Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense.

Writing humor is not something every single person can do.

Satire of satire tends to be self-canceling, and deliberate shock tactics soon lose their ability to shock, especially when they're too deliberate.

Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again.

Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

I like to play with tropes.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

I taught elementary school and painted apartments for ten years. Now I write full-time and never have to change a thing I write. Every book comes to me in a flash of inspiration and takes me about two seconds to finish. The longer books, like the 'Time Warp Trio' novels, take a little longer to write - more like four seconds.

I would think a sense of the absurd is more important for a political cartoonist, because that could define things like a sense of hypocrisy or a sense of the things one has to be skeptical about.

I don't ever try to make a serious social comment.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.