#view

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] ↗

— Colm Tóibín

#conceit #critique #diptychs #grandeur #novelists

I felt that my views and philosophies had been changed overnight. The philosophies that i had gladly carved in stone, recited and danced upon. ↗

— Cecelia Ahern

#views #change

If someone wanted to be a runner, you don't tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope. ↗

— Markus Zusak

#interview #motivational #rule #the-guardian #writing

If I’m going to write a book every American will want to read, it’s got to have lots of pictures. Those pictures must also move, and all the words in the book must be spoken and available audibly for all the readers to hear as they watch.

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— Jarod Kintz

#books #movie #movies #pictures #readers

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. ↗

— Joan Didion

#criticism #film #movie #reviewers #movies

Buscar la verdad es la mayor virtud y es lo que hace que un drama sea interesante. No me interesa contar historias con perfume de rosas en las que todo va bien ↗

— Clint Eastwood

#interviews #movies #movies

Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules... afternoons are best, but I'm too lethargic for any real regime. When I'm in the flow of something I can do a regular 9 to 5; when I don't know where I'm going with an idea, I'm lucky if I do two hours of productive work. There is nothing more off-putting to a would-be novelist to hear about how so-and-so wakes up at four in the a.m, walks the dog, drinks three liters of black coffee and then writes 3,000 words a day, or that some other asshole only works half an hour every two weeks, does fifty press-ups and stands on his head before and after the "creative moment." I remember reading that kind of stuff in profiles like this and becoming convinced everything I was doing was wrong. What's the American phrase? If it ain't broke... ↗

— Zadie Smith

#interview #writing #writing-life #life

We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views. ↗

— Maimonides

#habit #ideas #opinions #thought #views

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review. ↗

— James Russell Lowell

#review #reviewers #writing #nature

The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats. ↗

— Wil McCarthy

#nature-of-things #point-of-view #protagonists #universe #nature