James Atlas Quotations

If I had to put my money on it, ... I'd say he's not going to read it. He might leaf through it. He's not going to sit down and read it.

He himself has said you can follow the patterns and real events in his life by reading his books, which doesn't mean you can figure out his life by reading his books. Simply that the events in his life are the starting points for the books that he writes. But that's just the beginning.

He describes himself as a mild depressive, and he goes through just terrible suffering, much of it self-generated. And yet he's also an extremely buoyant person who finds a great deal in life to entertain and instruct and amuse him. He has a kind of vivacity about him. He's very funny, and he's very obsessed with certain themes.

To read Wilson... is to be instructed and amused in the highest sense - that is, to be educated.

Biographers, we're weird. For whatever reasons of conditioning, our temporal sense is different from other people's, and I knew it would take 10 years. And that's just the way it is.

A penumbra of somber dignity has descended over his reputation.

I had no reports which described him as a stud,

In writing this book I'm writing about my own life, a generation removed. But in the larger sense ... it was my discovery of Bellow's work, his voice that became for me the inspiration for this book. I was always fascinated by his life and wanted to know more about it.

In writing this book I'm writing about my own life, a generation removed, ... But in the larger sense ... it was my discovery of Bellow's work, his voice that became for me the inspiration for this book. I was always fascinated by his life and wanted to know more about it.

He's someone who experiences a certain amount of bafflement about his talents. How did it happen? How did he become who he is?

If I could answer a critic, people like James Shapiro in the New York Times say that I extrapolate the life too directly and explicitly from the work,

I doubt the garrulous archive bequeathed us by the tape recorder will prove as memorable as Henry James's thank-you notes.

A penumbra of sombre dignity has descended over his reputation.

Writing is the worst part of being a writer.

To read Wilson.. is to be instructed and amused in the highest sense - that is, to be educated.

All of us, I suspect, imagine that a world exists from which we alone have been excluded; all of us have our noses pressed against the glass. But if we contemplate our own lives, not the phantom life on the other side, we might find things in them to envy-a family that’s intact; a job we like; excellent health (the thing we take for granted and on which all happiness depends). Good fortune is there, however sporadic, however modest, however difficult to achieve. The trick is to recognize it.

An account of some of these acts makes Henry Miller's crudest imaginations seem as chaste as a nun's diary.