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When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award like the one you’re receiving tonight. It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember?
—Jeffrey Eugenides, 2012 Whiting Award speech
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When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award like the one you’re receiving tonight. It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember?
—Jeffrey Eugenides, 2012 Whiting Award speech
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Ian McEwan, in my opinion, makes superb airborne reading. Just the best. Jonathan Franzen, by contrast, reads better on trains. I have never found anyone who is fun to read on a bus. Certainly not Marcel Proust.
Joe Queenan / One for the Books
“I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.” —Dashiell Hammett
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”—G.K. Chesterton
Perhaps writing opens up a parallel universe into which, one by one, we’ll move all our dearest memories and rearrange them as we please.
Perhaps this is why all memoirists lie. We alter the truth on paper so as to alter it in fact: we lie about our past and invent surrogate memories the better to make sense of our lives and live the life we know was truly ours. We write about our life, not to see it as it was but to see it as we wish others might see it, so we may borrow their gaze and begin to see our life through their eyes, not ours.
” André Aciman / Alibis
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”—Angela Carter
“Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.” —T.S. Eliot
