Posts tagged novelists

What interests me about novelists as a species is the obsessiveness of the activity, the fact that novelists have to go on writing. I think that probably must come from a sense of the irrecoverable. In every novelist’s life there is some more acute sense of loss than with other people, and I suppose I must have felt that. I didn’t realize it, I suppose, till the last ten or fifteen years. In fact you have to write novels to begin to understand this. There’s a kind of backwardness in the novel…an attempt to get back to a lost world.
John Fowles

unknowneditors:

  • BUKOWSKI, Charles
  • LORCA, Federico García
  • BORGES, Jorge Luis
  • SCOTT FITZGERALD, Francis

by Pablo Morales de los Ríos 

UnknownEditors: Tumblr | Facebook

Hmm … rings quite true.

Hmm … rings quite true.

I actually enjoy Hemingway, but I enjoy John Irving more. Apparently, however, Irving does not enjoy Hemingway at all.

You soon lose the sense, in writing fiction, that you yourself are making things happen.

Larry McMurtry; Literary Life: A Second Memoir

[I know exactly what he means, this happens to me every time I write. The characters take over, they end up telling me what to write. It’s a strange phenomenon.]

Top 10 highest paid authors of 2011

Forbes has just released their 2011 list of the world’s highest paid authors (based on earnings from May 2010 to April 2011), and some of them may surprise you. We’ll tell you how much each author made, why you should know their names, and how they beat the recession’s effect on the fiction industry.

In a sense, good writing is phrase making, essentially; in another sense, of course, it must be much more—it must engage us on so deep and so unexamined an emotional level that we’re left breathless by it, as we are turning a corner in a museum and seeing an extraordinary work of art that no amount of iconographic art criticism can explain. —Joyce Carol Oates, BOMB 31 1990 

In a sense, good writing is phrase making, essentially; in another sense, of course, it must be much more—it must engage us on so deep and so unexamined an emotional level that we’re left breathless by it, as we are turning a corner in a museum and seeing an extraordinary work of art that no amount of iconographic art criticism can explain.

—Joyce Carol Oates, BOMB 31 1990 

I think that the most precious possession of a highly evolved man is his freedom of thought and expression; and that conversely the worst hardship he can suffer is the curtailment of that freedom through overt censorship or through the obligation of writing insincere materials to suit commercial editors.
H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to Robert E. Howard
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath

Japanese Literary Awards

German Literary Awards

International Literary Awards

 

Mark Twain’s Billiards Room This billiards room took up the entire top floor of his three-story Hartford, CT house where he lived from 1871-1891. The room was off limits to Twain’s wife and kids and reserved for Twain and his male guests to shoot pool, smoke cigars, and imbibe spirits. Twain also used the room as a man retreat, a place to write and hide from the domestic chaos on the other floors of the house. Twain explained the reason this special man space was needed in his home: “There ought to be a room in this house to swear in. It’s dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that…Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

Mark Twain’s Billiards Room

This billiards room took up the entire top floor of his three-story Hartford, CT house where he lived from 1871-1891. The room was off limits to Twain’s wife and kids and reserved for Twain and his male guests to shoot pool, smoke cigars, and imbibe spirits. Twain also used the room as a man retreat, a place to write and hide from the domestic chaos on the other floors of the house. Twain explained the reason this special man space was needed in his home:

“There ought to be a room in this house to swear in. It’s dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that…Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

i12bent: One of the founders of contemporary African (anglophone) literature, Chinua Achebe, is 80 today… He is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) - and for creating the Conrad controversy with his 1975 lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and its criticism of Joseph Conrad as “a bloody racist”. “I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens. They are generally adults. My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take. This is why I find racism impossible, because this is against humanity.” — C.A. Photo of Achebe in Lagos, Nigeria - 1966 by Carlo Bavagnoli, LIFE

i12bent:

One of the founders of contemporary African (anglophone) literature, Chinua Achebe, is 80 today…

He is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) - and for creating the Conrad controversy with his 1975 lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and its criticism of Joseph Conrad as “a bloody racist”.

“I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens. They are generally adults. My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take. This is why I find racism impossible, because this is against humanity.” — C.A.

Photo of Achebe in Lagos, Nigeria - 1966 by Carlo Bavagnoli, LIFE

i12bent