February 2012
7 tags
"so you want to be a writer?" by Charles Bukowski
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if...
“Rather than set the world on fire with radical contigency, I expect that ebooks...”
– Carl Zimmer responds to Jonathan Franzen’s rant against ebooks. (via curiositycounts)
3 tags
“Being a writer of fiction isn’t like being a compulsive liar, honestly.”
– Neil Gaiman (via planb-becomeapirate)
“It’s impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that’s...”
– Milan Kundera (Identity)
“Impoliteness marks you as a fool, for it takes away from you an advantage and...”
– The Samurai’s Tale Erik Christian Haugaard (via wildshieldmaiden)
“People who believe in God think God has put human beings on the earth because...”
– Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (via untilthedarknesssparkles)
“She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.”
– Raymond Chandler, The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959 (via liquidnight)
6 tags
“If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very...”
– e.e. Cummings
7 tags
“But the moment you start thinking of yourself alone, absolutely alone, and...”
– Nick Joaquin, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (via bookmania)
4 tags
“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and...”
– Carson McCullers (via eastatlanta)
The top 10 most popular Dickens characters
amandaonwriting:
Ebenezer Scrooge has been voted the most popular Charles Dickens character, according to a poll held to mark the 200th anniversary of the author’s birth.
1. Ebenezer Scrooge - A Christmas Carol 2. Miss Havisham - Great Expectations 3. Sydney Carton - A Tale Of Two Cities 4. The Artful Dodger - Oliver Twist 5. Fagin - Oliver Twist 6. Joe Gargery - Great Expectations 7. Pip...
4 tags
“Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves...”
– Sara Teasdale
Brown U. student uncovers lost Malcolm X speech →
infoneer-pulse:
The recording was forgotten, and so, too, was the odd twist of history that brought together Malcolm X and a bespectacled Ivy Leaguer fated to become one of America’s top diplomats.
The audiotape of Malcolm X’s 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn’t stumbled across a reference to it in an old...
5 tags
5 tags
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
4 tags
“Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There’s a strong streak of...”
– David Foster Wallace (via tarts) (via unicornology, sometimesagreatnotion) (via tothepersoninthebelljar) (via pinkeezy)
5 tags
“On the Wednesday I saw many public buildings in flames, including the Tuileries...”
– Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery (via themirroredarchive)
4 tags
4 tags
From The New York Times' review of "Tree of Smoke"
Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop. It comes with the armor and...
7 tags
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“This man was just basically one of those people on a boat, leaning on the rail...”
– Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
5 tags
“This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This...”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from “Snow-flakes” (via the-final-sentence)
3 tags
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different...”
– William James