Just resolve to shine, constantly and steadily, like a warm lamp in the corner, and people will want to move towards you in order to feel happy, and to read things more clearly. You will be bright and constant in a world of dark and flux, and this wi...
Once I was in a cafe in Portland and the woman at the next table and I began chatting and in the course of our conversation she strongly recommend I visit this web site called 'The Rumpus' so I could read this advice column called 'Dear Sugar.' It wa...
For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half m...
She read her way around the library, hungry for journeys, adventures, laughter and passion. She took each new book to bed like a lover, savouring every chapter, going too far some nights until the letters danced like insects and she was groggy next d...
Comedy is hard work. People expect you to be funny 24/7. So if you're not constantly cracking up your friends, it can hurt you professionally. They may not read your book or come to your show. 'She's a comedian? She's not that funny!' It's unfair 'ca...
Aspiring novelists should be taught that the old adage, “Write about what you know,” isn’t limited to what you have personally experienced. Vicarious experience is also a great part of what you know. Read a lot of history and it becomes part of...
Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-think...
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this...
People say, 'Well, whose career do you follow? Where do you see your career going? What movie do you want to do next?' And I can't tell you what type of movie I would go and do next. I would have to read the script and feel for a character. And if I ...
There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these ...
You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they'll never read...
The e-reading revolution may have reached our shores this year but it has yet to reckon with Australia's summer holidays. Intense sunlight plays havoc with screens and the sand invades every nook and cranny, so as convenient and sexy as your new iPad...
Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I ...
Look in your local Christian Bookstore. You could take most of the books there, throw them into the sea, and not lose anything valuable. The vast majority of them are just placebos that superficially attack trivial problems. During the eras when the ...
I always swore I would never write a book. But I read Clare Balding's and it was really interesting and so prettily written and lovely and not too revealing. I went to her book launch and met her editor who said 'why don't you think about it? You can...
When I read the 'Dick and Jane' stories, I thought they were afraid they might forget each other's names because they always said each other's names - a lot. So if Jane didn't see the dog, Dick would say, 'Look Jane, look. There is the dog next to Sa...
This book (Jarod Kintz's book) is trash. I mean, I assume it is, because that's where I found it while scrounging for lunch. However, I must admit that I haven't read it. I would have, but I am homeless, mainly due to my illiteracy (though Big Govern...
Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in there jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, a...
If I'm naughty, I'm grounded for two weeks or Mum takes my phone and my laptop because she knows I can't live without them. Sometimes I'll say, 'Mum, do you just want to take my laptop?' because I can still use the Internet on my phone. But now she's...
My bother was one of the bigger influences in my life, in as much as he told me I didn't have to read the choice of books that I as recommended at school, and that I could go out to the library and go and choose my own, and sort of introduced me to a...
I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper ...
