The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of ...
Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, a...
We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not b...
...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at...
Ho ho ho, tell me why you are not at home' is something Santa Claus could ask you if you stayed in a hotel over Christmas. It is most certainly not the reason why it is called 'hotel', but it will hopefully help you remember that the stress is actual...
As a novelist, Scott's influence was immense: his creation of a wide range of characters from all levels of society was immediately likened to Shakespeare's; the use of historical settings became a mainstay of Victorian and later fiction; his short s...
Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame. Even as Ken prayed for my soul, he did it in a way that welcomed me into the church rather than made me a scapegoat of Christian fear or an example of what not to beco...
He(Samuel, known as 'the Pea') was as apprehensive, weak and nervous about things as Swaminathan was. The bond between them was laughter. They were able to see together the same absurdities and incongruities in things. The most trivial and unnoticeab...
Then there was Mani, the Mighty Good-For-Nothing. He towered above all the other boys of the class. He seldom brought any books to the class, and never bothered about homework. He came to the class, monopolized the last bench, ans slept bravely. No t...
The sign was spray-painted in Arabic and English, probably from some attempt by the farmer to sell his wares in the market. The English read: Dates-best price. Cold Bebsi. "Bebsi?" I asked. "Pepsi," Walt said. "I read about it on the Internet. There'...
And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then pe...
Just ask any subjugated thing- a wife, population, race, deferred dream and resource misappropriated, or continental plate; and it will tell you stories of inevitable fault lines of not-quite-stray bullets and strike slip boundaries, places where int...
The new naval treaty permits the United States to spend a billion dollars on warships—a sum greater than has been accumulated by all our endowed institutions of learning in their entire history. Unintelligence could go no further! ... [In Great Bri...
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were Fr...
Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you rea...
I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scrive...
Hana: There's a man downstairs. He brought us eggs. He might stay. Almásy: Why? Can he lay eggs? Hana: He's Canadian. Almásy: Why are people always so happy when they collide with someone from the same place? What happened in Montreal when you pass...
Prince Feisal: The English have a great hunger for desolate places. I fear they hunger for Arabia. T.E. Lawrence: Then you must deny it to them. Prince Feisal: You are an Englishman. Are you not loyal to England? T.E. Lawrence: To England and to othe...
Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means ...
I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
