(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 120

Touching everything

The species produces people like me, once in a while, to hoard history; so that people like Bunyon can pick at it. I like to touch everything as I go by, only I find it hard to set down afterwards. I write everything, regardless of starts and stops, or rather, consumed by them. I don't think in stories, I think in seas, following wave after wave of curiosity. I lack imagination, or suffer from the surfeit of it; I lack shape, the gift of sudden freezing, that allows one to tinker with the ice.

- Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers

Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 96

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.

- George Konrad

Books I've actually finished lately: 93

Ellmann's biography of Wilde was one of the first big books I read (/finished), aged about 16.

From which event extends a trail of more-or-less predictable consequences...

On Oxford

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.

- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

I am a writer...

I am a writer, which means I’m trying not to be broke.

- Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

True story

Today I wrote a poem, entitled 'Story', and labelled 'non-fiction'.

These things happen.

'I am a writer...'

I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher. But, above all, I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man.

- The Master

Books I've actually finished lately: 34

Yes

The art of writing is the attempt to contain the teeming black scrawl which everywhere threatens to gain the upper hand, in the interests of maintaining a halfway functional personality.

- WG Sebald, A Place in the Country

Chekh-it

The task of a writer is not to solve the problem, but to state the problem correctly.

- Chekhov

[via Dominic Hilton]

On the ongoing American obsession with the (American) short story

Moreover, I teach stories as well as telling them, and like most writing coaches I find the short story most useful for seminar purposes. You can hold a short story in your hand, like a lyric poem; see it whole; examine the function of individual sentences, even individual words, as you can't readily do with Bleak House or War and Peace. (This pedagogical convenience, together with the proliferation of creative writing programs in the U.S.A., must be largely responsible for the happy resurgence of the American short story - at a time when, paradoxically, the popular audience has never been smaller.)

- John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

Credo

All old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound.

- Basil Bunting, 'A Note on Briggflatts'

Books I've actually finished lately: 19

Warning to would-be novelists (in particular)

I just started a new book. The detective is met at Sydney airport by a man wearing blue jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, with an unusually broad nose and curly dark hair. I was supposed to think Aboriginal. I thought, Magnum?!

- Amy Harris (on Jo Nesbø's The Bat)

The formula

Everything I write has a precedent in truth.

- Ian Fleming

Why hyphens are important

as proven, here, admittedly, by omission:

Two star novelists, Nathan Englander and Zadie Smith, on bringing back wrong and right, micro and macro writing, and David Foster Wallace

- Guernica

Though how they think they're going to bring back David Foster Wallace...

Literary realities: 2

Why are American novelist-academics who write themselves into novels as American novelist-academics always from small New England humanities colleges? Why do they never say, 'I'm Professor of English Literature at Harvard, I've written 11 highly acclaimed novels, won the Booker, the James Tait Black and the Nobel, had a film made about me and am generally a big swinging dick, so the rest of you can all just fuck off.'?

Not special

You must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else.

- JM Coetzee,* Elizabeth Costello
--
* who can afford to say shit like that.

Reflections in Oxfam Bookshop, Marylebone

1) If you don't have a name like Isaac Bashevis Singer you're screwed. Don't even bother putting pen to paper.

2) Everyone Has a Good Story? Bollocks. Everyone has a story. What makes it good is how you write it.

3) No-one has read that green novel by Ethan Hawke.