“Failure was something that these novelists all kept talking about, which is a weird thing with the Nobel Prizes and endowed teaching positions and everything. It’s easy to look at them and think, you’re establishment; but most of them, I think, if they are any good, still see themselves as outsiders. They still feel like […]
Books
Posted inPodcasts
The Alienation of Norman Rockwell
“[Rockwell’s world] is a place of safety and security, and it’s a place where there can be problems but where problems have solutions and the solutions are often provided by the people who live next door to you; if not the girl next door, then maybe the old man next door, and a doctor will […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Elizabeth Gilbert and the Art of Ignoring Rejection
“I was just so committed, and I did have six years of rejection letters. And it really didn’t break my heart. Some of them made me really excited because some of them had little handwritten notes at the bottom. Pretty good, but not our thing. And I was like, I got a really great handwritten […]
Posted inProfiles & Interviews, Quotes
Doris Lessing on What It Means to Be a Writer
“I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Winners and Losers in the Book Business
“It begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of ‘basic’ publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
'Understand Your Enemy': What It Feels Like to Be Depressed
“It always helps to understand what’s happening, and to be able to understand your enemy. It helps you cope and helps you panic less. Now that I know what depression looks like and I know what the general steps are, there’s also a progression I can look at and feel comforted by. I can feel […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
'Am I a Vulture?' Katherine Boo on Reporting and Poverty
“We take stories and purvey them to people with money. And in the conventions of my profession, which I try to adhere to, we can’t pay people for stories. Anyone with a conscience who does this work grapples with that reality, and if they don’t, I’d worry. I lie awake at night, and I think, […]
Posted inUncategorized
On Love and Sand.
“‘Do you love me, Westley? Is that it?’ “He couldn’t believe it. ‘Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches. If your love were—’ “‘I don’t understand the first one yet,’ Buttercup interrupted. She was starting to get very excited now. ‘Let […]
Posted inUncategorized
Renata Adler on Criticism, and an Old Secret Recipe for 'Making It' as a Writer
“Well, it used to be one way a young writer made it in New York. He would attack, in a small obscure publication, someone very strong, highly regarded, whom a few people may already have hated. Then the young writer might gain a small following. When he looked for a job, an assignment, and an […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Non-Mysteries of the Female Orgasm
“My initial forays into oral sex were a crutch, a way of compensating for my sexual inadequacies, and they were approached with the assumption that cunnilingus was a poor man’s second to the joys and splendors of ‘real sex’–like many, I took it for granted that intercourse was the ‘right way’ for couples to experience […]