Official website of the author
Here is the great difference between reading and writing. Reading is a vocation, a skill, at which, with practice, you are bound to become more expert. What you accumulate as a writer are mostly uncertainties and anxieties.
Susan Sontag, from Writers [On Writing]: Collected Essays from The New York Times (via)
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
“blue_beetle” on Metafilter
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
W.H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage” (via)
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
Flannery O’Connor (via)
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.