Category: words

“What does it mean when what you own is essential to who you are? In our everyday grasp of owning things, we tag it materialism, consumerism, consumption. But I trust you’ll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes: Someone with a thousand books is someone you want to talk to; someone with a thousand shoes is someone you suspect of belonging to the Kardashian clan.”

George Hodgman, author of Bettyville: “You kind of have to face the fact if you write a memoir that you are a somewhat aggressive person, that you are appropriating lives, in a way, that aren’t yours. And you put yourself out there and you try to be really generous, and you do what you can to get permission, but a lot of times the permission is meaningless because they have no idea to the extent that you’re going to examine, or what you’re going to say. … So memoir is a total minefield, as you know. It’s best if you write the book and leave the country.”

The great Uruguayan author is best known for his 1971 anti-capitalist manifesto Open Veins of Latin America – a work he repudiated last year. (He calls the prose unreadable.) But his later “technique is difficult to precisely describe, but it is easy enough to read. The word most often applied is ‘fragmentary,’ though the fragments are carefully arranged into unified wholes.”

“Licensing firm Dramatic Publishing had not extended the performance rights for the production, so Lee stepped in with Mockingbird Company. It will produce the play from 2016, giving proceeds to local communities.”

“Youthful achievement is often linked to privilege. Not everyone can afford to write when young. Some are already working more than one job. Others are raising children, as I was for many years. Still others may not feel safe expressing themselves, for any number of reasons.”

“The postapocalyptic imagination depends on an attitude of disillusionment that presupposes that hope once sprang eternal in the human heart.”

“With increasing pressure for writers to work for free – some of Australia’s largest books festivals offer writers a chance to donate back their small fee and work gratis – and the vast majority of authors struggling to earn a living at all, what is the knock-on effect of these individual actions? For future award winners and for funding (prize money or otherwise), the unintended consequences could be significant.”

“Just as the author romanticizes the reader, so does the reader romanticize the author — there’s something inevitable and touchingly human about it all. Many years ago, at a book signing, a reader said she wanted to be me because she felt that her own life was so drab. My heart sank like wet sand. The writer’s life can seem glamorous, but mine certainly wasn’t.”

“What I really needed was to step into the half-born book and let it close over my head for a few days – perhaps it was this kind of inchoate instinct rather than the more rational reason I gave myself, which was that I should walk at least a little way in my character Jack’s shoes in order to get a feel for the journey he makes.”

“While the narrator tells of sexual awakening, marriage, and adulthood, the ribbon around her neck (which she will neither remove nor explain) recalls the terrible buried knowingness of childhood. Campfire chillers draw their energy from the fact that everyone knows the ending will be horrible, and the teller knows exactly how.”