December 2010
40 posts
“I’m not the first person who feels that it’s the writer’s true occupation to...”
– James Salter (comfort for holiday traveling woes)
“My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a...”
– Rebecca West (birthday today)
“When I put my own mark on something and form it, I begin to know the whole truth...”
– Peter Taylor
“The time I do any writing is Christmas vacation.”
– A. R. Ammons
WatchOur Jonathan Franzen / Oprah video mash-up!
“One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.”
– John Steinbeck
“Sound is the extra, celestial conversation that showers in on me between the...”
– Les Murray
“One is very dull when one starts. You have to give yourself several good kicks...”
– V. S. Pritchett (birthday today)
“I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross...”
– Robert Bly
“One midnight worked the change
that made me so.”
– from “Nothing Song” by Devin Johnston
“To ask a novelist to talk about his writing is like asking somebody to cook...”
– Jim Crace
“I’m fated to deal in mixtures, slumgullions… As soon as I hear a...”
– Donald Barthelme
“I don’t find the sex part of prostitution that interesting… It’s the...”
– Claire Vaye Watkins on her short story in our new winter issue
“Art doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce...”
– Raymond Carver
“I’d hate to be certain there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish...”
– Louise Erdrich
“You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the...”
– Carolyn Kizer (birthday today)
WatchMario Vargas Llosa leaving the Grand Hotel in Stockholm right now to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Dispatch from Stockholm
“I’m a plumber, a colorist, a marvel. Let’s not even talk about when...”
– Saul Steinberg, in our new winter issue
“The world is a dark place, and I find it endlessly funny.”
– John Banville (birthday today)
“The barbaric gleams right under the surface of all human skin.”
– Jorie Graham
“I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are...”
– Louise Erdrich
“Godard has been a major nourishment to my sensibility and therefore, inevitably,...”
– Susan Sontag. Joyeux Anniversaire Godard!
“A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can...”
– John Steinbeck
“Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence. It may not...”
– Jorge Luis Borges
“It didn’t make any difference what story it was or what age the characters...”
– Stanley Elkin