Delbanco Quotes & Sayings

My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table. I think that's a mistake, in obvious opposition to the ideal of teaching which permits a student to be someone other than the teacher ... The successful teacher has to make each of the students a different product rather than the same. — Nicholas Delbanco

The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence. — Andrew Delbanco

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter. — Andrew Delbanco

Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to invent a fictive self. — Nicholas Delbanco

Jesmyn Ward returns to the world of her first two books, but here in the mode of non-fiction. A clear-eyed witness to the harrowing stories of 'men we reaped,' she quickens the dead and brings them, vividly alive again. An eloquent, grief-steeped account. — Nicholas Delbanco

By the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs to be a writer of fiction; love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt and fear of death. — Nicholas Delbanco

The writer gleans wind scraps; he listens wherever he can. Each day is full of instances; what counts, as with all stimuli, is the sympathetic response. — Nicholas Delbanco

Yet a period's character does affect individual character. Psychology, the study of what happens in our minds, is tightly interwoven with culture, the name we give to our beliefs, practices, and social behaviors. The scholar Andrew Delbanco goes so far as to define culture as a collective psychological notion. "Human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days - pain, desire, pleasure, fear - into a story," Delbanco writes. "When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope. And if such a sustaining narrative establishes itself over time in the minds of a substantial number of people, we call it culture. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves. — Andrew Delbanco