#writing

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#bad-writing #dullness #humor #writing #age

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die. ↗

— Yasunari Kawabata

#retirement #writing #age

We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing students are underwriting rather than overdoing it. ↗

— Stephen Kuusisto

#age

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops. ↗

— Geoff Ryman

#aging #books #old-age #reading #writing

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#writing #age

Being an author of a book is like being a mother of a debutante in the Middle Ages. You have to present your baby to society and provide her with dowry, and in your heart, you hope that some royalty spends a night with her and ensures her way to success. ↗

— Elvira Baryakina

#age

I want to write a poem about "Truth," "Honor," "Dignity," and whether the toilet paper should roll over or under when you pull on it. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#honor #life #poem #toilet-paper #truth

I think poor poetry writing skills are excused when you’re simply trying to flush out emotions. ↗

— Katie Kiesler

#poetry #writing #age

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly. ↗

— Jen Knox

#jen-knox #musical-chairs #philosophy #psychology #reading

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless. ↗

— Amy Bloom

#writers #writing #anger