I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write.
Madeleine L’Engle

vintageanchorbooks:

Congratulations to Don DeLillo, who has won the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, inspired by earlier incarnations that awarded prizes for lifetime achievement in the writing of fiction and, for the past three years, Creative Achievement Award for fiction.

DeLillo will be given the prize during the National Book Festival on September 21-22.

Those Crazy Customer

  • Customer: [Approaching the Nook counter] Do you actually work for Barnes & Noble or are you just Nook?
  • Me: Ma'am, Nook belongs to Barnes & Noble.
  • Customer: [Raises one eyebrow as if I'm lying]
  • Me: How can I help you?
  • Customer: I'm looking for a book.
  • Me: Do you know the author or title of the book?
  • Customer: It's written by - [gives a name]
  • Me: I'm not familiar with him, but we can go look him up in the computer.
  • Customer: [Cocks her hip and places her hand on her waist and smacks her tongue in a very condescending manner] Well, he HAS a TV show!
  • Me: Is it Game of Thrones? That's the only television show I currently watch.
  • Customer:
  • Me: I guess not. Follow me, we'll look him up.

ianbrooks:

Street Lit

Putting a message on a wall can be a much more effective way to reach the masses than expecting them to go find a book and learn it themselves. Some men just want to watch the world learn, regardless of medium. This collection of street arts details some memorable lines from famous books, hit the pictures to see which author and title, if you didnt already recognize them immediately.

(via: BuzzFeed)

Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.
J.D.Salinger (via adeana)

beaswellgirl

aaknopf: John Updike (1932-2009) delighted us during his lifetime with the variety of his gifts—as novelist, literary critic, poet, and also as a keen commentator on the art scene. In the fall, Always Looking: Essays on Art, appeared, collecting his final considerations of certain highlights of Western art over the last two hundred years—from the landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church to the steely sculptural worlds of Richard Serra, from the extravagances of Klimt to the Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. Today’s poem brings us this American master of word and image reflecting on the trajectory of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Piet How strange to see an arrow-straight career!Trees, the attempt to do the branches justice in honest Dutch style, led him, twig by twig,into the net of the rectilinear,of crosses and dashes and then thick framesfor colors prime and pure as chalice jewels,panels of heaven blazing between girders;he believed the world could be sublimated. Things and scenes no longer troubled him;a square tipped onto its corner was allhe needed grant the cockeyed real untilManhattan greeted his exile with jazz,with boogie-woogie and a grid of streetsthat proved his dream to be (bull’s-eye!) the fact. Download a printable version of the broadside of this poem here or by clicking the image at the top of the post. Learn more about Americana and Always Looking, and browse other titles by John Updike. To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link »

aaknopf:

John Updike (1932-2009) delighted us during his lifetime with the variety of his gifts—as novelist, literary critic, poet, and also as a keen commentator on the art scene. In the fall, Always Looking: Essays on Art, appeared, collecting his final considerations of certain highlights of Western art over the last two hundred years—from the landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church to the steely sculptural worlds of Richard Serra, from the extravagances of Klimt to the Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. Today’s poem brings us this American master of word and image reflecting on the trajectory of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.

Piet

How strange to see an arrow-straight career!
Trees, the attempt to do the branches justice
in honest Dutch style, led him, twig by twig,
into the net of the rectilinear,
of crosses and dashes and then thick frames
for colors prime and pure as chalice jewels,
panels of heaven blazing between girders;
he believed the world could be sublimated.

Things and scenes no longer troubled him;
a square tipped onto its corner was all
he needed grant the cockeyed real until
Manhattan greeted his exile with jazz,
with boogie-woogie and a grid of streets
that proved his dream to be (bull’s-eye!) the fact.

Download a printable version of the broadside of this poem here or by clicking the image at the top of the post.

Learn more about Americana and Always Looking, and browse other titles by John Updike.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link »

It is never too late to be wise.
Daniel Defoe; Robinson Crusoe
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
Mortimer J. Adler
Belcastroagency read.

Belcastroagency

read.

“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” ― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” ― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

I say, keep your mind and life open and young enough to read fairly tales all the time. Don’t grow up, it’s a trap!

lemechy

cinderellainrubbershoes: “…Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.” -Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians series  Indeed.

cinderellainrubbershoes:

“…Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.”

-Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians series 

Indeed.

cinderellainrubbershoes

Literary coffee & book shop in Belle-île-en-mer

Literary coffee & book shop in Belle-île-en-mer

amandaonwriting

The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle