Brian Evenson Quotes

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

— Brian Evenson

Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?

— Brian Evenson

“Truth cannot be imparted," said Kline. "It must be inflicted.”

— Brian Evenson

“I don't think that writing, real writing, has much to do with affirming belief
if anything it causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real. Good writing unsettles, destroys both the author and the reader. From my perspective, there always has to be a tension between the writer and the monolithic elements of the culture, such as religion.”

— Brian Evenson

“There has, I fear, developed the worst of needs, the need to know, coupled reluctantly with an awareness that I probably will, in fact, never know.”

— Brian Evenson

“Curiosity is a terrible thing, he was thinking. How is it possible to stop oneself from needing to know?”

— Brian Evenson

“I am your friend," Gous said. "I drank with you, didn't I?"
Kline tried to nod but nothing happened. He could see the wrappings around Gous' hand staining with blood.
"Besides," said Gous, "friendship is one thing, God another.”

— Brian Evenson

“Still," said Ramse. "You're not much. You're what you are and we love you for it, but you're not much.”

— Brian Evenson

“What was the truth? he wondered. How important was it to know? And once he knew, what then?”

— Brian Evenson

“His only mistake was not realizing there was a second car. There's always a second car. Except when there's not.”

— Brian Evenson

“That's Kline," he said. "We know and love him. He's like a person to us.”

— Brian Evenson

“As long as you are following God's will, friend Kline. But even God sometimes becomes impatient. You know the story of Jonah, friend Kline? How many whales do you suppose God will deign send to swallow you? When does God run out of whales?”

— Brian Evenson

“Of course there's another choice, he thought. There is always another choice. I'm just not going to take it.”

— Brian Evenson

“People clustered in twos or threes or fours, I have come to believe, both constitute creatures in and of themselves and, together as tandems or triunes or packs, form another sort of myriad-minded creature whose actions are far from predictable.”

— Brian Evenson

With every disaster, I have come to believe for my own personal reasons, comes a compensation, a certain balancing of the accounts - not spread evenly about but clumped here and there, of benefit to very few.

— Brian Evenson

“In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's 'The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on.”

— Brian Evenson

“Misreading is a big part of reading, the way in which the level of attention you're paying can lead to some interesting residue.”

— Brian Evenson

“Truth cannot be imparted. [] It must be inflicted.”

— Brian Evenson

“Julio's Day is a story of one man's life, but it's a great more than that as well. It's the story of the life of a century, also told as if a day. Beginning with Julio's birth in 1900 and ending with his death in 2000, the graphic novel touches on most of the major events that shaped the 20th century.”

— Brian Evenson

“Any time I put together a story collection, I don't know what it's going to look like overall - or even what the title story is going to be. Over time, I end up with a dozen or so stories, and I start to see a shape to them, how they fit together, and then I write stories that complement or extend that shape.”

— Brian Evenson

“Like a cross between Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee's Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films-like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all. With Rombes, Two Dollar Radio deftly demonstrates why it is rapidly becoming the go-to press for innovative fiction.”

— Brian Evenson

“Philosophy does provide me a structure and a way of thinking. Religion - like the religion I grew up with, Mormonism - also provides a way of thinking. And I think those two structures - one highly logical, the other anything but - are always part of my thought process as I'm putting together a story.”

— Brian Evenson

“Ideas for stories come in really different terms and really different ways for me. Sometimes they're from books, sometimes they're just kind of out of the air, from nowhere, sometimes they're biographical, or sometimes they're other things [everyday life].”

— Brian Evenson

I'm pretty instinctual when I write, and I really like to get to a point where I'm writing where I don't know what's going to happen next. Usually when I get to that point, something will happen that I find intriguing or interesting, or that will push the fiction in a way that I really like.

— Brian Evenson

“One of the primary differences for me between fiction and poetry is that fiction uses every sort of tool that poetry does but hides it much, much more. Fiction doesn't necessarily reveal what it's doing with rhythm and sound and patterning.”

— Brian Evenson

“When I say I'm instinctive [in writing], I do feel like I need to hide what I'm doing from myself. My mind just needs to be able to operate untrammeled.”

— Brian Evenson

“I read individual stories a lot in magazines and other places, too, but I really think there's something to be said for reading story collections as collections. That's not true of all story collections, to be honest, but for good ones I think it often is true.”

— Brian Evenson

I don't always know what's going to go on in terms of the mood of the story. Sometimes I start with the mood, but sometimes I just try to work toward discovering it. But I do think often there's a mood or unsettling quality, in which the reality of the world seems to be taken away, that I really love, and it's something that I almost always unconsciously move toward.

— Brian Evenson