When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another expe...
When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger … in touch with—or at least close to—what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the ...
Sidonie, I know you don't remember it, but you once promised to trust me beyond all reason. And I swear to you that all that I am, all that I possess, including this gem-stone, is yours. I need you. I can't do this alone. Forget your memories. Look i...
The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or ...
Can’t you imagine? Haven’t you told her about the place enough?” He tried the handle again, as if that could change anything. Meggie had covered the whole door with quotations. They looked to him now like magic spells written on the white paint...
In his book , written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another. Milosz had seen the Stalinisation of Eastern Eu...
Do You Know That By Just Saying "I WANNA DIE" Or "I WISH I COULD DIE" ...God Can Answer That Prayer??? You Will Be Cancelled In The Book Of Life And At Heaven You Will Be Dead, But You Will Just Be Walking On Earth Waiting To Go To Hell. Thats What M...
This is for all the people I’ll never meet. This is for the person I might have kissed had I taken a different subway line on Saturday and the person I might have been if that boy hadn’t broken my mother’s teenage heart. This is for the people ...
There’s a beautiful poem at the beginning of a collection of books we call the Bible. In that poem, it is written: "Then God said, ‘Let us make man.’” God then recognized that it was not good for man to be alone. We can all agree on that one,...
This is not written for the young or the light of heart, not for the tranquil species of men whose souls are content with the simple pleasures of family, church, or profession. Rather, I write to those beings like myself whose existence is compounded...
Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It mus...
Thirty years ago [written 2009], over-regulation, over-taxation, mis-regulation, statism, state corporatism, and economic folly, cosiness and regulatory capture, and a crescent ideological enemy without, who were assisted by enemies – both fifth co...
How can God allow this to happen? How can our predecessors allow this to happen? How can YOU allow this to happen? We could all blame everyone else for the problems of the past that brought us the present, but that doesn't do us any good. The past ha...
When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by s...
Margot Mary Wendice: Don't make me stay home. You know how I hate doing nothing. Tony Wendice: Doing nothing? Why there are hundreds of things you can do. Have you written to Peggy, thanking her for the weekend? And what about those clippings? It's a...
George Llewelyn Davies: What have you written, Mr. Barrie? J.M. Barrie: Well, currently I make my living entertaining princes and their courts with my trained bear, Porthos. [motions to his dog] J.M. Barrie: If you command your brother Peter to join ...
Nikola Tesla: I apologize for leaving without saying goodbye, but I seem to have outstayed my welcome in Colorado. The truly extraordinary is not permitted in science and industry. Perhaps you'll find more luck in your field, where people are happy t...
Peter Bradley: [interviewing Eli Cash on television] Now, your previous novel... Eli: Yes, Wildcat. Peter Bradley: Not a success. Why? Eli: Well... Wildcat was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular... [long pause as he starts to become spaced out]...
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a ...
Feel free to scream, whisper, and everything in between. I want to hear it all.
I wanted to meet the monster. Why go down if you can go up?
