Experimental Literature Quotes

I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.'

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of, instead of hiding the structure and making it look organic and natural, we're going to put the structure on the outside. But most of the time, at least for me, all I could attend to [in Swing Time] was that act of structural self-consciousness.

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where a very antiliterary literature was emerging - Kenneth Patchen and others. I kind of believed what Nietzsche said, that nothing not written in your blood is worth reading; it's just more pollution of the airwaves.

Pulver's skills as a post-Beat visionary are in rare form. A House of Hollow Wounds is a thrilling foray into the dark frontier of the weird.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.

Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.

From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.

'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword.

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.

Like all of my previous work - which I also hope is a bit hard to categorise - 'The Oopsatoreum' is an illustrated book, so a combination of words and pictures that tell a kind of story.

If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror.

Experimental novels are sometimes terribly clever and very seldom read. But the story that appeals to the child sitting on your knee is the one that satisfies the curiosity we all have about what happened then, and then, and then. This is the final restriction put on the technique of telling a story. A basic thing called story is built into the human condition. It's what we are; it's something to which we react.

'Pastoralia' by George Saunders. Possibly my favorite book. It's one of the weirdest books I've ever read. If Monty Python and Thomas Pynchon had a love child, and it was raised by Frank Zappa on a weird commune, that would be this book.

As I became very conscious and more aware of things I got very into the beatniks and that kind of stuff. They were very important to me for a few years.

You're often looking at writing from writers who, for the most part, are working in forms that traditionally fit into other genres. But sometimes, in the midst of their better-known stuff, there's this wayward thing, and because it's wayward it isn't considered representative of their work, so it falls through the cracks.