Posts tagged writers
Read This, Write That
Books you should read. Grammar you should know.
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.
(via libraryland)
Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.
(Source: superamit)
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little….
Life is, as I’ve said since I was 10, awfully interesting—if anything, quicker, keener at 44 than 24—more desperate I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara—my new vision of death; active, positive, like all the rest, exciting; & of great importance—as an experience.
‘The one experience I shall never describe,’ I said to Vita yesterday.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
“you boys can keep your virgins / give me hot old women in high heels.”
— Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell
If only I could believe in work. I hate work. Creation is not work—it’s play.
The complete list of words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.
Is it morbid? Is it weird? This fascination with dead people’s belongings? Maybe. In the wake of his death, a defaced book becomes a relic, something for the living to cling to, to flip through in hopes of finding pieces of him left pressed in the pages. I guess it is morbid and weird. All I know is, I would still be curious about these circled words if he was alive. He took language seriously, was careful with words. This is something I always respected.
Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
While not a full-blown literary recluse like J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami could charitably be called media-shy. He rarely gives interviews, and his surreal, dreamlike novels don’t offer much in the way of autobiographical insight, despite the fact that many of his narrators also happen to be middle-aged male Japanese writers who love jazz and pasta.
So Murakami fans will gleefully note that his new book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, is subtitled A Memoir. After decades of writing about haunted hotels and men made entirely of ice, has Murakami finally let his guard down enough to talk about himself?
