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oscar liked to kid himself that it was only cold, anthropological interest that kept him around to see how it would all end, but the truth was he couldn't extricate himself. he was totally and irrevocably in love with ana. what he used to feel for those girls he'd never really known was nothing compared with the amor he was carrying in his heart for ana. it had the density of a dwarf motherfucking star and at time he was a hundred per cent sure it would drive him mad. every dominican family has stories about niggers who take love too far, and oscar was beginning to suspect that they'd be telling one of these stories about him real soon.
- junot díaz, "the brief wondrous life of oscar wao," the new yorker december 25, 2000, and january 1, 2001
take the case of flaubert. i revere him, as many other novelists do; i reread him constantly; i cite to myself and to others his wisdom and practical advice; i agree with him that prose is like hair and shines with combing, that a line of prose can and should be as immutable as a line of poetry, and so on. but when, as a twenty-first-century english novelist, i feed a sheet of a4 into my ibm 196c, i do not refer to a nineteenth-century french novelist who held a goose quill. i write in a different language; the novel, like the technology, has moved on. it would be pointless and stultifying to seek to write like him. after all, he wrote like him, so why should i?
- julian barnes, "single-handed: infuences by julian barnes," the new yorker december 25, 2000, and january 1, 2001 (italics added by dante woo)
posted December 29, 2000 in print.