Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result ...
It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may...
And for a moment I though I would tell her, that it would be the easiest and the slightest thing imaginable- that after all, if anyone would understand it, she would. That I need only say, 'I am in love, Helen! I am in love! There is a girl so rare a...
...what I'm getting at is like the distinction between tourist and a traveler. The tourist experience is superficial and glancing. The traveler develops a deeper connection with her surroundings. She is more invested in them -- the traveler stays lon...
Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out o...
Is he bothering you?" "Nah just some old pervert waiting for the sex show." The ghost lips curled "If I was alive I'd teach you some manners First I'd-" "I'm sure there are losts of thing you'd do to me if you were alive, but seeing as though your're...
I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on dif...
Aw, fudge,' floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. 'You're a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?' I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium he threw at me. 'After five hundred years, ...
When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go bac...
The idea of our own rationality...was convincing to us only because we so wished to be convinced. To any impartial observer, could such a thing exist, the sham was patent. Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everyth...
Soeur Seraphina gently removed my lace fontanges. It was named for the King’s mistress Angelique de Fontanges, who had lost her hat while hunting one day and had hastily tied up her curls with her garter. The King had admired the effect, and the ne...
...Imagine having to ask whether you can go barefoot or not... But she remembers similar requests and prohibitions now, from twenty years and more back. "The childhood years are the best years of your life..." Whoever coined that was an unmitigated f...
...that the decline in reading among children was largely the fault of their parents. Parents these days don't read books, themselves, but they feel they should make their children read. Since they aren't readers, however, they have no idea what to g...
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our ...
We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned o...
Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, wh...
If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more. One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are pr...
That was a moment where something clarified about shame for me: it’s not just something negative but some kind of arrow, it’s pointing at something, some confusing blend of fear and desire. There was liberation in that, thinking of shame as somet...
As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enor...
[T]he strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian ch...
It seems kind of light for a dozen books. I think it's probably that unnatural number of Jason Statham DVDs you ordered." He has to have filmed a nude scene at some point in his career. I don't care how many shoot-'em-up action movies I have to watch...
