If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine...
In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt wit...
In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment. Our American heirs may...
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours....
Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child.
Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.
Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.Of course those who write short books have even less to say.
Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our...
Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so...
My father once admonished me to master the laws that govern fine writing until I could weave my words into worlds. If ever I accomplish that feat, I will sign my name to the tale.
My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.This is not quite true, i...
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of writing as a form of prayer: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the onl...
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.— Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library
Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even...
One of the problems of being a storyteller is the cultivated ability to extrapolate; in every situation all the come to me.
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