“It’s an indication of our great fortune, our great decadence, or both, that when you type the word “viral” in a Google search bar, the first result isn’t an influenza or meningitis. It’s videos.”
—Derek Thompson’s “The Secret of Viral Success is There Is No Secret of Viral Success,” at The Atlantic
June 2013
25 posts
“Libraries aren’t in the real world, after all. They’re places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought.”
—Paul Auster (via picadorbookroom)
“The muse won’t always cooperate and she will never be coerced. Sometimes she’d rather take a nap or see a mid-afternoon movie.”
—Jonathan Tropper, “On Writing Without Writing”
“Dear Harry, PLEASE sell this to The New Yorker as I am VERY VERY VERY poor … I STILL HAVE NO HOT WATER. I STILL HAVE NO HOT WATER. I shall go crazy.”
—
W.H. Auden’s plea to an editor at The New Yorker, as recorded in his diary, which just sold at auction for $75,000
“The Kindle changed my reading habits, because I now buy books pretty much only when I’m drunk, and late at night.”
—Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, to The Boston Globe
“I think the first thing—if you want to be a writer—the first thing you need to do is write. Which sounds like an obvious piece of advice. But so many people have this feeling they want to be a writer and they love to read but they don’t actually write very much. The main part of being a writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end, uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and really sinking into the work and writing. That’s how I write. That’s how writing gets done.”
—Cheryl Strayed, in a great interview with Amitava Kumar at Guernica
“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
Interviewer: Do you feel yourself to be in competition with other writers?
William Styron: No, I don’t. “Some of my best friends are writers.” In America there seems to be an idea that writing is one big cat-and-dog fight among the various practitioners of the craft. Got to hole up in the woods. Me, I’m a farmer, I don’t know no writers. Hate writers. That sort of thing. I think that just as in everything else writers can be too cozy and cliquish and end up nervous and incestuous and scratching each other’s backs. In London once, I was at a party where everything was so literary and famous and intimate that if the place had suddenly been blown up by dynamite it would have demolished the flower of British letters. But I think that writers in the U.S. could stand a bit more of the attitude that prevailed in France in the last century. Flaubert and Maupassant, Victor Hugo and Musset, they didn’t suffer from knowing each other. Turgenev knew Gogol. Chekhov knew Tolstoy and Andreiev, and Gorki knew all three. I think it was Henry James who said of Hawthorne that he might have been even better than he was if he had occasionally communicated a little bit more with others working at the same sort of thing. A lot of this philosophy of isolation in America is a dreary pose. I’m not advocating a Writers’ Supper Club on Waverly Place, just for chums in the business, or a union, or anything like that, but I do think that writers in America might somehow benefit by the attitude that, What the hell, we’re all in this together, instead of, All my pals are bartenders on Third Avenue. As a matter of fact, I do have a pal who’s a bartender on Third Avenue, but he’s a part-time writer on the side.
[From The Paris Review’s “William Styron, The Art of Fiction No. 5”]
Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 are up 6888% in the last 24 hours.
Right on, readers.
What You Need To Be A Writer
Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.
Qualities you need to be a novelist: Ditto.”
—Khaled Hosseini (via NYT)
“We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.”
—José Saramago, The Double (via bookshavepores)
