- George Konrad
Have a life lived instead of a career. Put yourself in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses.... If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joys of working can fill your days.
How apt that you should merely motion, saying nothing: for this land has not yet been given a name, certainly not a Latin one; it does not yet exist.- André Brink, An Instant in the Wind
The publishing trade shouldn't just be guarding against Google, but against itself, against its increasingly fainhearted conviction about its own necessity.- Roberto Calasso
Abdullah Sahab had an impish sense of humor and a hearty laugh, especially after a drink or two. He knew his whiskey. He famously ran an off license in South London for years before returning to Lahore. When somebody in the audience at the Karachi Literary Festival misunderstood the nature of the operation, asking him whether it was becoming for somebody of his stature to deliver liquor to clients, he responded, "I didn't go to them. They came to me."- HM Naqvi, in Scroll.in
One of the editors of the Enciclopedia Einaudi invited me one day to write the entry for 'body'. I told him I felt honoured and perplexed, and instinctively asked him who was going to be writing the entry for 'soul'. "There's no plan for such an entry," he immediately replied, as though I'd asked something improper. At that moment I realized we would never have seen eye to eye.- Roberto Calasso, The Art of the Publisher
In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition.- and other fascinating not-so-trivia from John McWhorter, in Aeon magazine
Ulysses is a copy-editor’s nightmare and a printer’s incepted Freddy Kruger in a copy-editor’s nightmare.- Josh Cook, in an column about the correction (or otherwise) of Joyce's 'typos'
Even the Grammarians, tho' their whole bufinefs and ufe be only to render the words of an Author intelligible, are ftrangely touch'd with the pride of doing fomething more than they ought.- Alexander Pope, in his preface to Homer's Iliad
(I forget where I read this, but if my memory serves me it was in some reliable source.)- Bertrand Russell, 'On the Value of Scepticism'
I use Moleskine notebooks, not because they’re any better than the alternatives, but because they make me feel like a proper writer, and not some inadequately-medicated schizophrenic, taking dictation from the mad voices jabbering in his head. Which, at times, is what the writer’s life is like.- Anthony McGowan, on his website
If I went to an academic conference on literary theory, I would have been bored out of my mind! But a town meeting about potholes, that interests me.- Lydia Davis, in conversation with Ane Farsethas
It took Dante, in the late Middle Ages, to take the revolutionary step of writing in his own Tuscan dialect. It would be a mistake, though, to see him with modern eyes as some kind of champion of inclusiveness. He did, after all, use Latin to make his case in On Eloquence in the Vernacular.- Ana Menéndez, 'Are We Different People in Different Languages?'
I'm sure you've had to say things you haven't meant before. You've read friends'poetry...? Had girlfriends...?- The West Wing
Extraordinary interview with Erica Jong in last Saturday`s Times. According to Jong a lot of the 'bad boy' writers who gave her books bad reviews had more than literary criteria on their minds. "I was too zaftig [curvy] to get a good review. Look at all the women who are praised. They`re either very, very skinny or very, very fat. Some of them are hunchback, and some of them enormously fat" - offensive remark about Hilary Mantel omitted [LOLZ] - "Not one of them is a woman you would want to f***."
Some years ago I gave Jong`s Sappho`s Leap a very bad review in the TLS. At the time I thought I did this because it was a very bad book. Now I know differently.
Glad she cleared all that up.- Harry Sidebottom, on Facebook
Several pit players use the long stretch between 'Getting to Know You' and the end of Act I to pull out books or magazines. Primis said, "When I played South Pacific, I read Herodotus."- Henry Alford, in The New Yorker
Of course, you end up becoming yourself, even when you’re a journalist.- Rebecca Mead, in The New Yorker
I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.- Michael Ondaatje
I expect you have heard that, having failed as (a) a civil servant, (b) a novelist, (c) an editor, (d) a publicist, I have now sunk to the last rung... — literary journalism.- Leonard Woolf, to Lytton Strachey
You say that the title pages of French translations of your books read, Traduit de l'americain. Mine say Traduit de l'anglais (Sud-Africaine).- JM Coetzee, Here and Now: letters 2008-2011
This is not the American Transatlantic, it's the English one.- John Lucas, poet
she was quick to reply 'Not at all, as the fish said,' or just 'As the fish said,' or simply 'Fish,' to summarize this saying: 'Not at all, as the fish said when asked how he'd like to be cooked, in the oven or the fryer.'- Alejandro Zambra, via James Wood, in The New Yorker
The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancient, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered- Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus
I would have thought we would have developed different terms for two very different moral acts.- JM Coetzee, Here and Now: letters 2008-2011
In a digressionary footnote, he repeats a story out of Plutarch: did you know that Caesar's assassin Brutus was similarly afflicted with bulimia on his march to the Battle of Philippi?- Hugh Aldersey-Williams, on Sir Thomas Browne's 'Boulimia Centenaria'
He would not have shared the king's love of fart jokes.- Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century
My mother said, "Oh, it's as dark as a grave."- Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers
I thought for a moment. How did my mother know how dark a grave is?
"Have you ever been in a grave?" I asked her.
"Stop being silly," she chided as she went to find candles.
My older sister had been doing her homework. "There is no electricity in a grave, idiot," she said. "Of course it is dark."
Though Whitman gives the impression that he witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater and provides a dramatic description of the event, he was not in fact there. But he did believe he enjoyed a special relationship with Lincoln. Both men were tall.- JM Coetzee, in the NYRB
an attempt to instrumentalise or "weaponise" poetry for the purposes of fighting "the cultural war" is probably not something the US military should be engaged in.- Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, Poetry of the Taliban
AS MOST PEOPLE KNOW, it’s not easy to make money writing. Young writers read of a mythical past when aspiring authors could work for “newspapers” in exotic locales like Kansas City, but even if there is still a newspaper operating out of some soon-to-be-abandoned warehouse on the banks of the Missouri, I bet it isn’t hiring. The BFA/MFA track has become one of the last refuges for young writers before they start fighting their way into the welfare state of grants and fellowships, and even if we remain undecided on the question of whether writing can be taught — if I have to read another essay asking that question I may run away to Kansas City myself — we have definitively declared that the teaching and learning of creative writing can be a good way to make money (or at least to postpone the need to do so).- Johannes Lichtman, in the LA Review of Books
John Williams’s Stoner is about an English professor defeated by department politics and his wife’s unreasoning hatred. In the copy I borrowed from my university library, someone had written, on the title page, Oddly comforting.- Jamie Fisher, in the LA Review of Books
Pick out about an hundred Italian Airs from several Authors, good, or bad, it signifies nothing. Among these, make use of fifty five, or fifty six, of such as please your Fancy best, and Marshall ’em in the manner you think most convenient. When this is done, you must employ a Poet to write some English Words, the Airs of which are to be adapted to the Italian Musick. In the next place you must agree with some Composer to provide the Recitative … When this is done, you must make a Bargain with some Mungril Italian Poet to Translate the Part of the English that is to be Perform’d in Italian; and then deliver it into the Hands of some Amanuensis, that understands Musick better than your self, to Transcribe the Score, and the Parts.- via Alexandra Coghlan, in The Spectator
The heirs of Bomber Harris are not squeamish about the far end of a bomb site...- Simon Jenkins, in The Spectator
I returned from this journey embarrassed by my own ignorance, at how ill read I was.- Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus
The privilege of being subtle is the distinction between the fortunate and the unfortunate.- John Berger
All his life, Dave had been bald.- Stephen Collins
Barely a hair anywhere on his person at all.
(Bar the bristles in his brows... and one under his nose)
But apart from those,
Dave was as smooth as a bowling ball.
(Hence the wig.)
"Fool," said my Muse to me...- Sir Philip Sidney ('courtier, soldier, poet and romancer'), Astrophel and Stella
There are many more modes of the past than those allowed by Imperfect, Perfect & Pluperfect!
I racked my brain for a better way of rendering "Wehswirtschaft" (p.14), but not to much avail.
I haven't had proofs from "Sprache im technischen Zeitalter" (what a stupid name for a journal)...- WG Sebald, 'Letters to a Translator' in Little Star 5 (2014)
(A good dictionary and usage dictionary are strongly recommended. You're insane if you don't own these already.)- David Foster Wallace, teaching materials (English 183D, Pomona College, 2008), in The David Foster Wallace Reader
What enabled me to give up [smoking] was the realisation I could go on loathing the campaigners without continuing to damage my health.- Wendy Cope
As you wrestle with the rantings of Austria's most lethal watercolourist...- Richard Lea, in The Guardian
You dare to cast aspersions?! I am not the one who was entertaining with a failed poet...!- Mortdecai
[He] was, in fact, born in Smyrna ... where his father, George Herbert Willans, was Assistant Locomotive, Carriage and Wagon Superintendent of the Ottoman Aidan Railway.- Wendy Cope, Life, Love and The Archers
A translator, like a novelist, needs to have not just a talent for languages. A translator also needs talent.
This was written in response to a request from BBC Radio for a new poem. It has not been broadcast.- Wendy Cope, 'The Poet's Song' (a poem about the second-rate poetry you hear commissioned for the radio), in Serious Concerns
