Recipes and Household Tips From Great Writers (via Entertainment - Maria Popova - Recipes and Household Tips From Great Writers - The Atlantic)
Publishers perpetuate this bias in ways large and small, including packaging that primes readers to regard women’s books as less important: Big novels by men often have text-only covers, while novels by women tend to be illustrated by domestic images. The underlying problem is that while women read books by male writers about male characters, men tend not to do the reverse. Men’s novels about suburbia (Franzen) are about society; women’s novels about suburbia (Wolitzer) are about women.
— “Why the Literary Landscape Continues to Disadvantage Women”
“There are so many reasons not to write. But few are any better than because you are going to get laid. That is a good reason. Everything else, all these other distractions are meaningless. Friends betray you. There will always be another party. I remember when John Updike blew off some big important New Yorker Party because he was writing. […] Everything in the world is trying to distract you from getting something on the page. Our own doubts about everything we do is crushing. Don’t let it crush you. No one has any idea what they’re doing.”
“But monsters, goblins, whales, beavers. They can be the best narrators. I remember some Vintage paperback about a woman who have a love affair with a dolphin. Told from the point of view of the woman! What a missed opportunity. Some ex-girlfriend gave it to me and was mad when I took it back to the store and traded it in for some Eastern European thing I wanted to read. Kafka had it right. The bug is much more interesting than boring old Gregor Samsa. No one would want to read a story in which a dude woke up in the morning to find himself transformed into some boring Czech person.”
I wonder whether you will remember one last piece of advice you gave me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic twenties and I was going out into that world to try to be a writer.
You said, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”
It wasn’t too long afterwards that the depression came down. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame any more. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely you were right about one thing, Edith. It took a long time—a very long time. And it is still going on and it has never got easier. You told me it wouldn’t.
— John Steinbeck, in a letter to a former professor.
I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner this old woman – obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, ‘I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.’
“And I said, ‘I wrote that’. And she said, ‘No you didn’t’. And she walked off and went on her way.”
— Stephen King
A swirling maelstrom of every file you have ever deleted takes human form. It illustrates unambiguously all of your faults and shameful secrets and if anyone were ever to see you it you would be humiliated and socially destroyed but fortunately it has manifested itself deep in interstellar space, millions of light years from you and your pathetic existence
Francis Alÿs
The Nightwatch
Surveillance cameras observe a fox exploring the Tudor and Georgian rooms of the National Portrait Gallery at night.
Rule #7:
“Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.”
— Anne Enright
