J.R.R. and Edith Tolkien in Oxford, 1961.
I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.
“Have you really read all those books in your room?”
Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”
Primrose Hill Books.
Support your local bookstore.
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
Anyone want to meet for a nice cup of coffee and good conversation?
People think of education as something they can finish.
Isaac Asimov (via we-are-star-stuff)
[Yeah, that type of thinking needs to stop]
If I had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.
Have they lost the others?
Yup.
La Carreta Literaria ¡Leamos! de Cartagena (Cartagena’s Literary Wagon, Let’s read!).
Martín Murillo Gómez has been traveling with his wagon through Cartagena, Colombia. His is the only wagon that transports books.
He lends the books to readers and he also reads to the people who gather around him in parks, plazas, schools and universities.
Sometimes you’ll find him reading from a book with blank pages, stories that he has created for years to invite children to the world of literature.
His journey has led him to meet personalities such as Gabriel García Márquez, who found a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and sign it for him.
Thanks to Murillo’s effort and the support of others, the wagon that started with 120 books (some of which he bought with the money he made by selling water on the streets and some which were donated by people who believed in his project) now has 3,500 books.
With the support of sponsors, Murillo has been able to continue with his passion for reading and his commitment to spread the love for literature.
books by ~iseewithmyeyes
Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 144, Richard Price
Richard Price has proven that there can indeed be a third act in the career of an American writer. After a distinguished debut as a novelist, with The Wanderers, and a subsequent literary faltering that led to his recasting himself as a screenwriter of studio-produced movies, Price returned in recent years to fiction with Clockers, a monumental work that is both a murder mystery and a descendant of literary naturalism.
In fact, at the time of this interview, as Price was finishing a spate of screenplays, script-doctoring assignments, and embarking on a new novel, this member of the first generation of writers who grew up as much with television as with books seemed poised to shuttle back and forth between the composition of capacious and highly regarded novels and what is often seen by writers as the devouring maw of the motion-picture industry.
Price’s fiction has always been cinematic. The Wanderers, a novel about an eponymous gang he wrote while in the Columbia University writing program, was an evocation and exaggeration of his childhood in the Bronx housing projects and was made into a film soon after publication. That novel was followed in quick, almost annual, succession by Bloodbrothers, also adapted for the screen, Ladies’ Man, and The Breaks, this last harkening back to his college experience at Cornell.
We all grow up with ten great stories about our families, our childhoods…they probably have nothing to do with the truth of things, but they’re yours. You know them. And you love them. So use them. And that’s what I did. That’s what I reached for, to become a writer.
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All the quotes on this site are marked with the author's name, except those marked with TBV; those quotes are my own.
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