“I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
—Cormac McCarthy
June 2013
4 posts
“Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope.”
—Philippe Petit
“First coffee. Then a bowel movement. Then the muse joins me.”
—Gore Vidal, on his writing process. (via theparisreview)
May 2013
2 posts
April 2013
4 posts
“The odd thing about this life is that you spend half your time trying to get people to listen to you and the rest of the time trying to get them to leave you the fuck alone.”
— Tom Waits (via bbook)
“The reason is that all you know about me is what I have written so far; it has nothing to do with what I want to do next, because I don’t know, either.”
—Tom Stoppard (via theparisreview)
“If you’re not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn’t going to, either.”
—James M. Cain (via theparisreview)
March 2013
6 posts
Sine qua non (/ˌsaɪnɨ kweɪ ˈnɒn/; Latin: [ˈsine kwaː ˈnoːn])[1] or condicio sine qua non (plural: condiciones sine quibus non) refers to an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient. It was originally a Latin legal term for “[a condition] without which it could not be,” or “but for…” or “without which [there is] nothing”.
“…What it says to the real world is it’s all about us, we have the money, we put the money in, and we control the image. And I say fuck you, wankers. Are you fucking kidding? That’s not cinematography. That’s control of the image by the powers that be, by the people that want to control the whole system because they’re all accountants. You’ve lost cinema.”
—Ah, Mr. Doyle, you’ve still got it, you little ol’ curmudgeon.
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
—Albert Camus
February 2013
13 posts
“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.”
—Hermann Hesse
“I’ve never thought of counting words. I’d rather not know.”
—Iris Murdoch (via theparisreview)
“You should never believe an author if he tells you why he has certain recurring themes.”
—Kazuo Ishiguro (via theparisreview)
