January 2012
1 post
praise i've been waiting for, for the past 8 years...
“I love when you talk dirty.”
- js
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing...”
– From Aristotle’s De Poetica. via Lapidarium (via viafrank)
November 2010
4 posts
“Literature is the next best thing to God. Joyce would disagree. He would say...”
– Edna O’Brien, from an interview with The Paris Review, 1984
“Look here — what if I love you?”
– Vladimir Nabokov, “Spring in Fialta” (via scout)
“I’m one of those who never finished Moby-Dick. I couldn’t get through the thick...”
– Barry Hannah, from his interview with Wells Tower in the last issue of the Believer. (via mcnallyjackson)
October 2010
10 posts
from Paris Review interview with Anne Carson
INTERVIEWER
I end up putting you and Alice Munro together. In each of you there’s an attachment to the physical world and the details of life—almost like you are reveling in them—whether they’re bad, good, painful, or whatever else. Does that seem right to you?
CARSON
I recognize that. Reveling is good. A good word for it. But she and I are very different. What we have in common is perhaps...
An inscription in a copy of Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever:
.
Katie-
These stories are very quiet and beautiful, I think. You’ll like them. I bought a copy for myself after I saw the author on PBS. She seemed like someone who really loved writing, and cared for her stories like children. I liked her a lot.
Merry Christmas
From
Scott
12/96
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us...”
– Ira Glass (via Rabbit Write’s interview on Gala Darling)
This is going to be all over our dashboards but I needed to be reminded of it too.
(via healywu)
Correction
mcnallyjackson:
The post “Weekend New Book Round-Up,” about rounding up the new week’s new books, misstated the dildic content of Philip Roth’s The Humbling, now out in paperback. The dildo is a green strap-on dildo, not a double dildo. We regret the error.
Interviewer: You're a mother, a teacher, a writer and an activist. How do you find the time to do it all?
Grace Paley: Well, I have all day.
William Gibson says the future is right here,... →
“In the 1960s I think that in some sense the present was actually about three or four years long,” he said, “because in three or four years relatively little would change.”
That stood in sharp contrast to late 2010, he said, when big changes had become a daily occurrence.
“Now the present is the length of a news cycle some days,” he said in an interview with BBC News.
That ferocious rate of...
September 2010
7 posts
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
– The “Shortest Horror Story Ever Written”, attributed to Frederic Brown.
(via Futility Closet) (via ontheborderland & theshipthatflew)(via richiemillennium)
“If you go home with someone, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em.”
– John Waters (via jaredgeller) (via catsolen)
“Write drunk, edit sober.”
– Ernest Hemingway (via scribnerbooks)
August 2010
4 posts
Take a guess, how many pages do you think I have?
Once I said to Bruno, Take a guess, how many pages do you think I have?
No idea, he said.
Write a number, I said, and slip it across the table. He shrugged and took a pen out of his pocket. He thought for a minute or two, studying my face. A ballpark guess, I said. He hunched over his napkin, scrawled a number, and turned it over. I wrote down the real number, 301, on my own napkin. We pushed...
“Writing is so hard! Sometimes you have to get a pedicure and even buy a necklace...”
– Judy Blume, on her Twitter
We’re soul mates, right?
(via taxidermychurch)
May 2010
2 posts
“My favorite compliment that I got from a writer early on was, ‘you leave out all...”
– Amy Hempel (via newspaperblackout) (via austinkleon)
<3u Amy Hempel and also <3u, cutting the fuck out of a story.
(via meaghano)
(via newsweek)
April 2010
5 posts
Watchbad writing — trailer.
“You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them;...”
– Philip Roth (via azspot)
March 2010
7 posts
January 2010
4 posts
Wes Anderson on J.D. Salinger
I remembered this passage from the F. Scott Fitzgerald story “The Freshest Boy”:
He had contributed to the events by which another boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy. It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this...
“Just writing is when the novelists hand is not quicker than the reader’s...”
– William Maxwell
December 2009
7 posts
“There is no language without deceit.”
– Italo Calvino (via 52books)
“If you’re not a reader, then you’re not a writer.”
– (via ifthisthenthat)
Dubliners was rejected 22 times. →
bibliotheque:
skybarn:
An editor once told Nabakov that his LOLITA manuscript should be “buried under a large stone.” Now that editor is buried under a stone and LOLITA still titillates readers around the world. An editor once told F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby character.” Editors, agents, and publishers tell writers to go away. You don’t go...
Shoe, Meet Other Foot
Two blow-by-blow reviews of Birkensnake #2 are now out (along with this big-picture affair), and that means two people were forced to read a story of mine (“Dogfight”) with the intention of putting together a brief gloss or blurb on it.
I am pleased to announce that my fiction has so far proved divisive, meaning I’m one transgression away from the coveted descriptor...