If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult ...
You should not try to live without thinking and feeling, for then you are only a piece of machinery, not a human being. Even if it hurts. Even if the thing you have to think of are sad, think them through; live them through and write or tell me. Only...
I had authority issues. In my defense, my math teacher had it coming. She’d made me write one hundred on the black board, so I wrote one, zero, zero in words since one hundred consisted of those numbers. Because she hadn't been specific in her inst...
Lat at nigh have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were mean to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't pain, an entrepreneur who never starts a ventur...
Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if...
But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could poss...
He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the...
How are you going to spend your day today? The key word being spend. Our time is one of the most precious gifts in our lives. Once today is over, that's it. Think about how you really want to spend your day. Tomorrow, today will be history. It's your...
Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: '...
Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of...
To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of b...
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew n...
A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events...
On Alex Rodriguez's difficulty performing in clutch situations, Joe Torre writes, "In key situations, he can't get himself to concern himself with getting the job done instead of how it looks. There's a certain freefall you go through when you commit...
Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get ...
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being t...
Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s shit. These are the things all the great philosophers just won’t tell you flat out about life. You keep moving, keep living, keep breathing And you keep writing-creating because that’s what you do And ...
Even when there were good wars to write about, writers such as Jane Austen wrote novels concerning marriage. They usually went like this: 'You're being a real jerk.' 'Sorry about that. I was secretly helping you.' 'Oh, you're wonderful! And you have ...
(When asked “Was the model for Midori (a character in Norwegian Wood) modeled after your wife?”) I showed your message to my wife. She got mad and yelled: “What would make them think I was the model for Midori?!” She told me to fix the misund...
I believe we write our own stories. And each time we think we know the end - we don't. Perhaps luck exists somewhere between the world of planning, the world of chance, and in peace that comes from knowing that you just can't know it all. You know, l...
I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I co...
