There have been times when I'm writing about things that are personally embarrassing. Like any human being, sometimes I can't help but wonder - 'What are the people I know going to think about this?' So I have to remind myself that all is permissible...
Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need ...
And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).
The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, wh...
I want to write a book on sex. It will be filled with phrases like "Uuuhgh yeeeaaaah," and "Ooooh that's it," and "Whose hands are those?
I don't leave a note. There's nothing else to do. At first, I'd wanted to write Merry Christmas on the box somewhere, but I decide against it. This isn't about words. It's about glowing lights and small things that are big.
To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterf...
I'm going to be a person who writes stories. I never told mom and dad how much I loved them. I wanna be someone who can tell a lot of people how much I love them.
For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O...
As I build sentences, I roll them sometimes on my mouth to taste them as I write them. I have this emptying of the mind and the focusing on that single thing, that infinitesimal moment and there is perfection, you know, as if I exist fully in that na...
Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.
How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tende...
Max never intended to be messy with his writing, which he could read just fine, years later if necessary, even if his teachers couldn’t. He merely found that his active mind tended to move too fast for his hand to keep up with.
Being a successful student is about more than reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. It's about being a skilled negotiator, a keen observer, and a master planner.
The wordlessness of depression is a galling experience. You can't phone your friends, writing an e-mail is beyond you, you can't put pen to paper. The disease is a crash course in meaninglessness, lack of structure, the collapse of form.
Marriage is nothing to underestimate. Success in marriage is about getting back up, again and again. Ultimately, the Shulamite had to write her own role in Solomon's drama. She made Solomon's problems her problems. For her, that was worth every bruis...
Sentimentality is so apt to creep in if we write at length about children as seen by their elders. And the reality of childhood, as we all experienced it, creeps out. For we all remember that our childhood, as lived, was immeasurably different from w...
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old amb...
My new story collection won’t please everyone, nor was it meant to. Then again, not everybody lives in my world. If they did, I’d have to move out and find another world to write about.
I loved her like I needed her. I soaked her up like a soup bowl made of bread. I’m hungry for her even as I write this now. Somebody get me a spoon!
Is it by chance that the 18th century of France, the century of the "philosophy of enlightenment," did not produce any poets except the Marquis de Sade, who -- despite his participation in the events of this epoch -- expressed the first violent prote...
