They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started...
And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but...
Most of us have small, sad places somewhere in our hearts and my father was no exception. Sometimes we let our feelings escape in bursts of anger. Sometimes we make long, dismal faces. My father did neither. He felt deeply but he kept his feelings to...
Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard a...
The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing...
Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should b...
People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity. Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writer...
According to Wallace, the expectation that art amuses is a 'poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with,' since it places all of the power with the audience, sometimes breeding resentment on the part of the author. 'I can see it in myself ...
The new ideal of virginity and widowhood opened up a new era of sympathetic collaboration between men and women, and for male-female friendship. By establishing a category of women who were understood to be off-limits with respect to romantic entangl...
Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is sh...
I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do wit...
You have made some notes, read some writing books, and done some research. Mostly what you've done is talk about writing a book. An idea for a book is not a book; it is a waste of time. There is no singular thing that makes someone a writer, but ther...
By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept...
I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to...
Now, if the writers of these four books [Gospels] had gone into a court of justice to prove an alibi, (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by supernatural means,) and had they gi...
I've always found the Irish really attractive-they make wonderful writers and sexy firefighters, and if they didn't like the Red Socks they'd be perfect.
Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the we...
When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. 'No,' he said. 'I'm just going to try to be a full-time writer.' Oh, his boss said, you want a more money. 'No, really,' he said. 'This isn't a negotiation. I'm just giving you my thirty...
Carefully squeezing through the forest of adults that crowded the aisles, feeling like an intruder in a forbidden temple, he cautiously pushed deeper into the newsstand and found a new paperback by a writer whose novel about vampires he had read and ...
... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female si...
I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conr...
