January 2012
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So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the...
– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
[I’ve posted this before, but it is so worth another look!]
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You know, it’s hard work to write a book. I can’t tell you how many...
– Ellen DeGeneres; The Funny Thing Is…
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He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the...
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Habits of a Reader
whispering-literature:
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Writers don’t merely write words. They take existing words put them...
– TBV
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Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry...
– Stephen King
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable...
– Carl Jung (via dewdropsoflove)
Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread.
– Henry Stevens (via fsgbooks)
W. W. Norton: First Lines from New Books Out... →
wwnorton:
“More than forty years ago, a wave of popular fascination with a musical group distinguished by youth, charm, great talent, and exceptional hair was dubbed a form of ‘mania’ by the press. We have not seen such a case of mania again…until recently, with the emergence of ‘Dudamania,’ which…
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The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion,...
– Dave Barry; Dave Barry Turns Fifty
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David Foster Wallace's 10 favorite books →
[I’ve read various literary critics declare that they thought Wallace gave this list as tongue in cheek or that perhaps he was trying to make a point about what we read. I’m not sure any of these suggestions are warranted. I do know, after a year or so of listening to interviews, reading Wallace, and hearing him make various statements about how some popular authors and their work are...
And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom...
– David Foster Wallace (via musicwordscolourslights)
[Why did DFW have to die? He was so crucial to literary thinking!]
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Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write,...
– Graham Greene
The success of failure: Pulitzer winner's... →
marynelson8:
When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan writes a novel, it may go through 50 or 60 drafts.
The first one begins simply. She sits down with a legal pad and an open mind, deliberately creating by hand. She attempts to write about a half-dozen pages a day. At some point, the first draft is done.
Then comes, as she puts it, the “unpleasant tasks.”
From a CNN weekly series on...
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Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things...
– Julian Barnes; Flaubert’s Parrot
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When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine —...
– Verlyn Klinkenborg, “The Whirling Sound of Planet Dickens” (via fwriction)
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If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I...
– Émile Zola
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Human ignorance will eventually enslave humanity. If we don’t know or...
– TBV in response to PIPA/SOPA.