“There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”
“To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”
“Do you think it’s possible to live and not regret what you have done with your life? And do you think regret is an emotion, or something more like of a place a person comes to, where you could walk, you know, or sit, or lie in it, like in a house, and go to sleep?” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“The character of men, apparently, is incidental; virtue is the showershow of sparks erupting from the nose pressed to the grindstone.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“The secret is there isn’t any secret. No mystery. We know it all. We’re afraid to believe in what we know, and talk is the sound of our terror.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“You take a thing like love, and put it in a woman’s mouth, nine times out of ten, it comes out sounding like a threat.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“Beats me why so many of the finest things in life have got to stink so bad.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part. Scholars never agree about anything. The rabbis were interested in finding solutions to contradictions, and when three Jews meet they will have three answers to every question.” — Theodore Zeldin (interviewed in The Jewish Chronicle)
“A sensible old man is wise to hold on to a sensible old wife. The younger woman does not know that drama is wasted on an old man with cold mad eyes.” – Christine Schutt, Prosperous Friends
“There may be cures to loneliness but marriage is not one of them.” – Christine Schutt, Prosperous Friends
“Most people who think they are practicing law are actually making binders, and my guess is that most people who think they are doing whatever important thing they are doing are making binders. The binders from law firms go to a locker in a warehouse in a parking lot in an office park off an exit of a turnpike off a highway off an interstate in New Jersey, never to be looked at again. No one ever read them in the first place. But some client was billed for the hourly work.” — Elizabeth Wurzel, from The Cut
“It is possible to find fame at the wrong time. The gods get distracted and send their gifts too late or too soon. If fame comes when we still need it too much, that shining light of acceptance every artist dreams of and chases after, then fame can destroy us. If we still believe it is the answer to all of our needs, the proof that we are worthy creatures after all, it can burn us into position. Stunt us. Quickly turn us into plant matter. If we believe the light will give us all the sustenance we need, we shoot out roots into whatever shallow soil we may find ourselves in the moment we first feel its warmth, bending our bodies towards that radiant light. And bending ever further as it starts to find other targets.” — Jessa Crispin, Bookslut
“What sounds fresh today will stink rotten tomorrow. As a writer you must make a choice: try to catch up with the slang or create your own language that will be fresh and alive always, even after you pass.” – Mikhail Shishkin (interviewed by Jessa Crispin in “Sifting the Desperate Lies from the Truth”)
“If it is to remain something meaningful, philosophy does not have to limit itself to describing things, it has to make things happen, it has to effectuate a change. That’s why the locus of philosophy, the place where it dwells, is not the books, nor the academic papers, but the body of the philosopher. Philosophy does not exist properly unless it is embodied in a human being; in a sense, philosophy is word become flesh.” – Costica Bradatan, “Philosophy as an Art of Living” (emphases in original)
“The writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal ‘thing’ he claims to ‘translate’ is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum.” – Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (trans. Richard Howard)
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” – Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (trans. Richard Howard)
“You don’t become a great poet in your spare time.” – Jack Gilbert (interviewed by Gordon Lish in “Poetry Is the Art of Prejudice”)
“We are in danger from a glut of mediocrity of an extraordinary high calibre.” – Jack Gilbert (interviewed by Gordon Lish in “Poetry Is the Art of Prejudice”)
“In a work of art, there is a reason why everything happens. Sometimes the author doesn’t even know what the reason is, but some part of them has picked and chosen and arranged. And the art is getting all those demands right.” – William H. Gass (interviewed by Greg Gerke in “Many-Layered Anger”)
“You can’t just write by spilling the words on the page. You have to arrange them. And you have to arrange them not only in terms of one another, but with the sentences that came before, and the sentences you haven’t written yet. They have a demand.” – William H. Gass (interviewed by Greg Gerke in “Many-Layered Anger”)
“Most philosophy is utterly wrong, but oh god, it’s sometimes very gorgeous, and sees connections that can be lived by.” – William H. Gass (interviewed by Greg Gerke in “Many-Layered Anger”)
“Add radio to print and the word became ubiquitous. It overhung the head like smoke and had to be ignored as one ignores most noise. It was by loose use corrupted, by misuse debased, by overuse destroyed. It flew in any eye that opened, in any ear hands didn’t hide, and became, instead of the lord of truth, the servant of the lie.” – William H. Gass, “The Book as a Container of Consciousness”
“Too many writers write about their lives. It’s easier, and it’s seductive, and it can be catastrophic. ‘It happened to me, and therefore it must be interesting.’ You know, that’s sort of awful.” – William H. Gass (interviewed by Greg Gerke in “Many-Layered Anger”)
“Nobody is as crazy as a man who thinks he is important.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark
“If the maker’s mind is prepared, the immediate materials are always suitable.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark
“It is a dangerous thing to suddenly deprive a man of hope–he can turn violent. It is important to kill hope slowly, so that the loser has time to adjust unconsciously to the loss.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark (emphasis in original)
“Silence is always proper. When I understand this better I’ll stop talking. You won’t be able to hear me for miles. I will radiate silence like a dark star shining in the gaps between syllables and conversation.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark
“Stories are the most durable texture of life for us. Not forms of societies, but stories. Stories are really what keeps everything together, in a way. When you are abandoned by stories — when you go back beyond the invention of writing, beyond the literary tradition — you feel of course lost: because one needs stories.” – Roberto Calasso (quoted in “Curator of Miracles in Milan”)
“Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’s mind. The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.” – William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
“A problem is determinate if it has a definite number of solutions, indeterminate if it has an indefinite number of solutions, and impossible if it has no solution.” – G. A. Wentworth, Plane Geometry (emphases in original)