About David Leavitt: David Leavitt is an American writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction.
Assume makes an ass out of you and me.
I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from a...
In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.
It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like a...
Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.
It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.
The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unrel...
When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.
Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.
Real people have a way of banging against the doors you've closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you.
Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.
