January 2011
77 posts
Félicitations, Philip! →
“[Writing is] like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of...”
– Peter Carey
“Every morning, I have woken up knowing that I will never run out of books to...”
– Kenzaburo Oe (birthday today)
“The thing is not to follow a pattern… The thing is to accept your own life and...”
– Katherine Anne Porter
“What isn’t tragic belongs to the comic spirit. The novel is nourished by...”
– Joyce Carol Oates
“By honoring one another’s creation we honor something that deeply connects...”
– Joyce Carol Oates
“To me, politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but...”
– James Jones
“The pub is the great piece of neutral territory, for which there are rules, but...”
– Kingsley Amis
“My job is not to give answers or to find solutions, but to ask questions, to...”
– Tahar ben Jelloun
“If you can’t write like New York, you have no business living in New York...”
– James M. Cain
“I never ever define from the outside; I don’t qualify what I’m...”
– Nathalie Sarraute
“I’ve written many a good tale in Vermont during a blizzard.”
– Barry Hannah
“There was deep snow on the ground. I was in a sleigh, wearing my red wool hat...”
– Ten Stories from Flaubert, Lydia Davis
“One reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to...”
– Philip Larkin
“The premise of moral art is that life is better than death; art hunts for...”
– John Gardner
“As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to...”
– Martin Amis
“What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.”
– Mary McCarthy
“Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the...”
– Joyce Carol Oates (Lewis Carroll’s birthday today)
“I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is...”
– James Baldwin
“I like to change tones… to look for the forces of life wherever they may...”
– Pablo Neruda
“A poem for me is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.”
– Charles Olson
“Every word has a great burden of memories, not only just of one person but of...”
– Heinrich Böll
“It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness....”
– Iris Murdoch
“That’s in part what sends me to writing stories—to balance out the usual and the...”
– Hortense Calisher
“On the front page you’re stuck with the news. The news dominates you. I wanted...”
– Gay Talese
“I’m a recovered alcoholic. I’ll always be an alcoholic, but...”
– Raymond Carver
The Plimpton Project →
A fun tribute our founding editor, George Plimpton.
“The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of...”
– James Dickey
“It’s been a somewhat checkered career as a gay man. I was never totally...”
– Anne Carson
“A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.”
– Marianne Moore
“We are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these...”
– Haruki Murakami
“All teenage girls are at least half-lesbian.”
– Emma Straub on My So-Called Life
“The world is such a zestful place, even in its bleakness.”
– William Stafford
“Some writers are like cacti—every seven years here comes a glorious flower; then...”
– Julian Barnes
“Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise...”
– Reynolds Price (February 1, 1933 – January 20, 2011)
“Literature is a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into. One can do...”
– Julio Cortázar
“You have to use your imagination to invent something better than life because...”
– Erskine Caldwell
“I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and...”
– Anne Carson
“One of my many collegiate affectations was to play old records on a plastic...”
– The Culture Diary of Wesley Yang, Writer
“I do think that there is this central, groundbreaking veracity in literature,...”
– Julian Barnes (birthday today)
“The ways people are similar is at least as interesting as the ways in which they...”
– Ian McEwan — winner of the 2011 Jerusalem Prize
“For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the...”
– Francoise Sagan
“For me, there’s no way of life where I’m not completely showing my ass. The...”
– Heather Havrilesky on Disaster Preparedness
“One of my teachers said that I oscillated when I was seventeen between being...”
– John Hollander