Magic Hours Quotes

“An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

“Of that time, there is still much we do not know.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

“Your work gets better when you let go of your anger,” Harrison said. “Because anger is always didactic, and the didactic is of no value for a novelist”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours

“I believe,” he said, “in what I call the secret mainstream. Kafka was there too. Today, yes, we know Kafka was the voice of an overwhelming bureaucracy with a deep evil inside of it. Often we see these figures in the secret mainstream. I am one of them.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours

“a scene in which Bruno talks to his prostitute girlfriend about life in America (under the Nazis, Bruno says, they beat you and cursed you, but in America, “They do it ever so politely, and with a smile”)”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours

“Somehow in all of this we are still capable of finding some illumination, some truth, some place where we step out of ourselves, where we are ecstatic, where we have an ecstatic, visionary realization.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours

“When Athenaeum’s review appeared, it proved fatal to Moby-Dick’s success. “Our author,” it read, “must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who…summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessness, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise.” Blood was in the surf, and American critics fell over one another to carve off a piece of Moby-Dick’s beached carcass. While very few of the reviews were as scathing as Athenaeum’s, some even grudgingly acknowledging Melville’s odd brilliance, the book was a disaster. It went out of print, thirty-six years later, with a total of 3,180 copies sold.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours

“Americanness is also the central, and centrally unexamined theme of The Room. Wiseau cast himself within the film as a hunk of Johnny Americana, with not corresponding recognition of how absurdly ill fitting this role actually is.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

“Those who maintain that writing cannot be taught are in effect promoting the Priesthood Theory of Writing. I short, a few are called, most are not, and nothing anyone does can alter that process.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

“I enjoyed what I read, but since I regarded- and regard- Saunder’s work roughly as salable as a Hefty bag filled with hypos, I was too depressed to even write him back. I also suspected that, if I did, I was going to get an extremely loquacious pen pal (and perhaps even increasingly nude photos).”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

“The suicide John Kennedy Toole is probably the most famous True Outsider, though it pains me to admit that I regard A Confederacy of Dunces as one of the most overrated novels ever published. I am glad, all the same, that it was published, if only for the moments of reflection it caused those who rejected it to suffer.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

“What needs to be reinforced is the idea that good writing - solid, honest, entertaining, beautiful good writing - is simultaneously the reward, the challenge, and the goal.”
― Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation