Russell Baker
Author: cwq
“Midlife crisis. Age. The heart gets more interesting than structure. I’ve got kids, I’ve got a wife, we’re stuck with each other for a while. And suddenly there’s an understanding that this is what life is — it’s actually the mess, it’s the mud, it’s the tangle. It’s not the clean, hygienic … fireworks. It’s the little invisible novels that get written between two people every day of their lives. It’s the subtle power shifts. It’s the love, it’s the less-noble sentiments that make every single day either good or bad or not so good or wonderful or moving through all these things at the speed of West Cork weather. This is interesting stuff. Why go out there in search of extraterrestrial life when it’s already here?”
David Mitchell
“When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.”
Nicholson Baker
“A writer’s life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure’s bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen. Except the act of writing.”
E.L. Doctorow
“An idea you have might not be original — Aristotle will always have thought of it before you. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original. Men love women. It’s not an original idea. But if you somehow write a terrific novel about it, then by a literary sleight of hand it becomes absolutely original. I simply believe that at the end of the day a story is always richer — it is an idea reshaped into an event, informed by a character, and sparked by crafted language.”
Umberto Eco
“Writing doesn’t mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.”
Umberto Eco
“Those things about which we cannot theorize, we must narrate.”
Umberto Eco
“I believe that poetry, like no other art, articulates an essential part of the human consciousness.”
Dana Gioia