Archives for 2010
Hemingway: No rule on how to write
There’s no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it’s like drilling rock and blasting it out with charges.
Ernest Hemingway
The true size of Africa
Africa is larger than the U.S., China, India, Japan, and all of Europe combined. Via (click to view full size).
How Writers Write: Margaret Atwood
Philip Roth interviewed on “Fresh Air”
TERRY GROSS: So if [writing] is so hard, why do it?
PHILIP ROTH: Well, that’s a question I ask myself too. I’ve been doing it since 1955. So that’s 55 years. It’s hard to give up something you’ve been doing for 55 years, which has been at the center of your life, where you spend six, eight, sometimes ten hours a day. And I always have worked every day, and I’m kind of a maniac, you know. How could a maniac give up what he does? Tell me.
GROSS: Is that seven days a week, like Saturday and Sunday?
ROTH: Yeah, I usually do, yeah.
GROSS: That is obsessive.
ROTH: Maniacal.
GROSS: Maniacal?
ROTH: Give it its right name. It’s maniacal.
Via nprfreshair
Orwell: Why I Write
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell, “Why I Write“
Roth: “The ordeal is part of the commitment”
“I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.”
Arlo Guthrie: Songs are like fish
Songs are like fish. You just gotta have your line in the water. And it’s a bad idea to fish downstream from Bob Dylan.
Arlo Guthrie