Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
Decision. I was tired of his jealousy, sick of his belief that the only permissible topic of conversation was his unrecognized genius.
Also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety.
So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improveits quality but save your life in the process.
Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stum...
Perhaps Aquinas’s notably soft line on gluttony may have had something to do with the fact that the saint was said to have had what today we might call a weight problem.
One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower?
I’ve always thought that a close-reading course should at least be a companion, if not an alternative, to the writing workshop. Though it also doles out praise, the workshop most often focuses on what...
In the spring of 2007, a staging of Kesselman’s version, directed by Tina Landau at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, seems to have maximized its potential.
If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it’s just as if a little light goes on inside me.
Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter.
Vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt,
She lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions;
With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it's essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly i...
We don't know what we'd do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA or character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan.
Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer...
The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the clichés and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversati...
Paris is an insomniac’s heaven. There is always something to photograph, something hidden in the shadows. One can see so much more in the darkness than in the light of day.
Minutes after the shootings, everybody’s cell phone rang.
Love is strange was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto.