#writers

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

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons. ↗

— Ishmael Reed

#novels #writers #writing #men

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters. ↗

— David Gerrold

#typewriters #men

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books. ↗

— Betsy Lerner

#writers #money

...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead. ↗

— William H. Gass

#literary-criticism #the-recognitions #twentieth-century #art

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition. ↗

— Michael Richardson

#commodity #entertainment #literature #stories #surrealism

In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct. Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out. ↗

— Chitralekha Paul

#society #writers #writing #nature

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#children #difficult #grown-ups #write #writers

To a young heart everything is fun. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#fun

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined. ↗

— Charles Nodier

#fantastic #fantasy #genre #horror #supernatural