Quotes about writing
page 47

“Remember that Puerto Rican literature always experienced a kind of shortcoming because there was a moral obligation to write realistically, to dramatize our struggle for independence—our colonial drama. If this was ignored, it became a faulty literature which should be punished with oblivion. Imaginative literature was practically disqualified…”

Luis Rafael Sánchez (1936) Puerto Rican playwright and novelist

On the thematic constraints of Puerto Rican literature in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00096005/00024/14j (Sargasso, 1984)

Imagination, Literature

“Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint scripturus. Often must you turn your pencil to erase, if you hope to write something worth a second reading.”

Horace book Satires

Book I, satire i, lines 72-3, (transl. Rushton Fairclough, 1926)
Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)

Hope, Reading

“If you look at the poems in Prelude, you can identify the later material by identifying the poems with more white space and unexpected line breaks. Grief did that to me and my writing. It exploded my expectations and introduced these blank pockets of deep feeling. My prose writing became more fluid and lyrical…”

Saeed Jones (1985) American poet

On how losing his mother affected his writing in “You and I Have Peril in Common: The Millions Interviews Saeed Jones” https://themillions.com/2019/11/saeed-jones-qa.html in The Millions (2019 Nov 21)

Feeling

“Something you see in the book is my tendency to self-bully. It started when I was a gay black kid growing up in the suburbs. I wasn’t bullied by individuals; kids weren’t shoving me into lockers or calling me slurs to my face. Shame—electrified by racism and homophobia—was enforced by the broader culture though, and in response, I started bullying myself. I started saying cruel things about myself to myself. While I’ve generally grown out of self-hate, an ease with being tough and candid about myself to myself is an integral aspect of my writing…”

Saeed Jones (1985) American poet

On confronting self-hatred in his book How to Fight For Our Lives in “Interviews: Saeed Jones” https://bookpage.com/interviews/24492-saeed-jones-biography-memoir#.Xd7p5PlKjcs in BookPage (2019 Oct 7)

Hate, Books, Self-confidence

“I have a term I came up with called fusion fiction – that’s what it felt like, with the absence of full stops, the long sentences. The form is very free-flowing and it allowed me to be inside the characters’ heads and go all over the place – the past, the present. For me, there’s always a level of experimentation – I’m not happy writing what we might call traditional novels…”

Bernardine Evaristo (1959) British writer

On what she calls her writing style in “Bernardine Evaristo: ‘I want to put presence into absence’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/27/bernardine-evaristo-girl-woman-other-interview in The Guardian (2019 Apr 27)

Happiness, Past

“I used to submit to anthologies and magazines when I was a student – but I knew I was never going to be picked up. All their writing was, you know, about the Canadian landscape or something. And my poem is about this woman with her legs spread open.”

Rupi Kaur (1992) Canadian poet

On how she felt that her poetic topics were unconventional when compared to other poetry submissions in “ The young ‘Instapoet’ Rupi Kaur: from social media star to bestselling writer” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/27/rupi-kaur-i-dont-fit-age-race-class-of-bestselling-poet-milk-and-honey in The Guardian (2017 May 27)

“I am out of theatre. I will not work with any theatre, producer, writer, director, or actor who plays and lives the stereotype. So I write fiction, essays, and articles.”

Frank Chin (1940) American writer

On his leaving the theater world (as quoted in the book Notable Asian Americans http://smithsonianapa.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2009/10/chin-frank.pdf)

“The first thing that begins to happen when you begin taking yourself seriously as a writer is this imaginary writer’s block that people talk about, but I never really suffered from. But there’s this barrier between the spoken word and the written word, once you set something down in writing it’s supposed to be set in stone or you take on this funny attitude that writing is unnatural…”

Frank Chin (1940) American writer

On the writing process in ““FRANK CHIN: HIS OWN VOICE” https://resisters.com/by-frank-abe/frank-chin-his-own-voice/ in the Bloombury Review (September 1991)

People, Suffering

“My main concern was to write a novel that uses all of this stuff that is accessible, to write a novel that deals with white racism and Chinese American history and the real Chinese fairy tales and the heroic tradition, and to demonstrate that a Chinese American could do all of this without sending whites up the wall or alienating anybody…”

Frank Chin (1940) American writer

On his novel Donald Duk (as quoted in ““FRANK CHIN: HIS OWN VOICE” https://resisters.com/by-frank-abe/frank-chin-his-own-voice/ in the Bloombury Review; September 1991)

History

“I found that being pregnant was different from how I thought it would be…It shares a lot in common with writing in a way. You have an imaginary version of yourself pregnant, and an imaginary baby, an imaginary idea of yourself as a mother…”

Jackie Kay (1961) Poet and novelist

On correlating motherhood with writing in “Jackie Kay: Interview” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7800799/Jackie-Kay-Interview.html in The Telegraph (2010 Jun 5)

Way, Idea, Baby

“Many great writers inspired me, of course, but inspiration is not the same as a direct influence. I was often stirred by the beauty of great prose, the passion and startling intensity of hard-won truths, which leapt from that creative fire. … For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth, as in Kafka or Céline. Isn’t that what good writing finally arrives at? The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clichés when he wrote them, any more than those resounding lines in Shakespeare. They only became dog-eared from overuse.”

Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) American novelist

The Paris Review interview (1999)

Pain, Truth, Beauty, Dogs

“I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places. I have written more books of nonfiction because my fiction is an exploratory process — not laborious, merely long and slow and getting slower.”

Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) American novelist

The Paris Review interview (1999)

Books

“Some of his writings about the Muslims expressed harsh and provocative judgments. But (….) they were invariably written in response to writings or pronouncements of Muslims which either vehemently attacked Hinduism, the Arya Samaj, and the Swami himself, or which supported methods such as (…) the killing of apostates, and the use of devious and unfair means of propaganda.”

Swami Shraddhanand (1856–1926) Indian monk and philosopher

He himself “never advocated unfair, underhand or violent methods”.
Prof. J.T.F. Jordens, (Jordens 1981: 174-175) quoted from Elst, Koenraad. Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars. (2019). New Delhi : Rupa.

Support

“As a writer, my primary responsibility to readers is to write a story that is entertaining, and authentic. I wanted to write about characters who felt true to life, while also providing a way for readers to laugh at the foibles of others. Some of my characters are foolish, some are wise and kind, others are shallow and misguided. That’s how regular people behave too, and in fact we all cycle between many different ways of being…”

Uzma Jalaluddin (1980)

On writing characters in “Interviews with authors at EMWF: Uzma Jalaluddin” https://theontarion.com/2018/09/13/interviews-with-authors-at-emwf-uzma-jalaluddin/ in The Ontarion (2018 Sep 13)

Life, People, Way

“Writing a book is so strange. You start off in one spot and end up in another. But I think when I first set out to write the book, there was a certain element of trying to right historical wrongs I saw as a voracious reader and representation of immigrants and children of immigrants…”

Uzma Jalaluddin (1980)

On what led her to write Ayesha At Last in “Interviews with authors at EMWF: Uzma Jalaluddin” https://theontarion.com/2018/09/13/interviews-with-authors-at-emwf-uzma-jalaluddin/ in The Ontarion (2018 Sep 13)

Children, Books, Thinking

“All that you write confirms the grave condition of the world in this black age of ours. Again and again the best representatives of humanity must suffer through the tragedy of an age-old battle of all that is progressive and vital against the outworn and deadening concepts with which the consciousness of the majority is filled. As we see, this battle has already taken on a planetary scope, and is carried on in all realms and in all fields of life; yet the adherents of Light and progress are multiplying, and each new idea or discovery is more readily recognized then at those times when because of ignorance the discoveries most essential for humanity were postponed, sometimes for hundreds of years.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

17 March 1938

Life, Age, World, Idea

“Should the CIA stooge Guaido and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow, along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton. Under the last Washington-controlled government in Caracas, poverty reached historic proportions. There was no healthcare for those could not pay. There was no universal education; Mavis Mendez, and millions like her, could not read or write.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

John Pilger, The War on Venezuela is Built on Lies, CounterPunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/22/the-war-on-venezuela-is-built-on-lies/ (22 February 2019)

Education, Democracy, Universe, Reading

“We don’t even have the power to build a bubble, right? That’s the ultimate story of being who we are and writing about ourselves. We don’t even have the authority to create that bubble.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom American writer, sociologist, and professor

On people of color not having the freedom to live sheltered lives in “Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom: Raising Really Good Hell for People Who Cannot” https://www.guernicamag.com/dr-tressie-mcmillan-cottom-raising-really-good-hell-for-people-who-cannot/ in Guernica Magazine (2019 Mar 20)

“Sometimes I think that what I do must be either idiotic and naïve or courageous. I don’t know which. If there was no threat of violence, that is what you would do. This threat of violence shouldn’t dictate what you are going to write or hinder you in any manner.”

Meena Kandasamy (1984) Indian poet

On the threat of violence in “Meena Kandasamy interview: ‘I don’t know if I’m idiotic – or courageous’” https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/meena-kandasamy-interview-i-don-t-know-if-i-m-idiotic-or-courageous-9238644.html in the Independent (2014 Apr 6)

Courage, Thinking

“Who does the novel belong to? I am writing about a different reality, so I need to shape it to fit my reality. You don’t want to do the same. You don’t want to do the done thing. To take a risk, you still need to be absolutely on the margins. I am doing what I want to do.”

Meena Kandasamy (1984) Indian poet

On how she defines herself as a writer in “Meena Kandasamy: ‘If I was going to write my life story, I would condense that marriage to a footnote’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/25/meena-kandasamy-interview-exquisite-cadavers in The Guardian (2019 Nov 25)

Reality

“A memoir for me means a person’s life story; if I was going to write my actual life story, I would condense this entire marriage into a footnote.”

Meena Kandasamy (1984) Indian poet

On her book When I Hit You in “Meena Kandasamy: ‘If I was going to write my life story, I would condense that marriage to a footnote’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/25/meena-kandasamy-interview-exquisite-cadavers in The Guardian (2019 Nov 25)

Life, Marriage, Personality

“They go off to sea for nine months, they’re sick half the time, bad things happen to them, they see others die. Then they come back home and they have not a cent in their account. The way it ruins these men in their very spirit is a crime that’s horrific to see. And it’s hard to capture that in writing because wage theft, that term, is so boring. But on the ocean, it’s so pervasive and so ruinous that I would put it up there on par with putting men in an oven and cooking them slowly.”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On the victims of wage theft in “Wage Theft, Slavery, and Climate Change on the Outlaw Ocean” https://civileats.com/2019/09/27/wage-theft-slavery-and-climate-change-on-the-outlaw-ocean/ (Civil Eats; 2019 Sep 27)

Men, Bad luck, Way, Home

“This negation of our existence, and the omitting of our stories and histories, is one of the reasons I write — I write to exist. We cannot escape our past; our past determines what choices we make for the future. It determines how we act, how we see ourselves…”

Isabel Quintero

On the absence of people of color in her school curriculums in “‘My Writing is My Activism’: An Interview with Isabel Quintero” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/my-writing-is-my-activism-an-interview-with-isabel-quintero/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017 Feb 1)

Making love, History, Past, Future

“Writing can be a way of honoring those who’ve suffered real traumas and often surmounted them. And when a story has not yet been fully reflected in formal histories, the telling has a purpose, or so we hope…”

Carolina de Robertis (1975) American writer

On writing and history in “Interviews: Carolina de Robertis” https://bookpage.com/interviews/24365-carolina-de-robertis-fiction#.Xebr8_lKjcs in BookPage (2019 Sep 3)

Hope, Way, History, Suffering

“Many people look at bitcoin as a means of enrichment, but for me it was not just an instrument of prosperity - it was the idea of absolute freedom. I believed in this idea even when it was not relevant at all and Bitcoin did not become ten times more valuable in a year, simply because it corresponded to my ideal ideas about money. This event did not affect my mood, it was rather the opposite, the motivation to continue the path. But still, once again writing on the Internet that you have bitcoins is not worth it.”

Maxim Mernes (1996) Russian businessman, investor, blogger

About libertarianism and blockchain Source: Максим Мернес: "Нужно покупать ликвидную криптовалюту", Maxim Mernes, 2019T08:56, @Максим Мернес, ru, 2019-11-21 https://argumenti.ru/society/2018/12/595045,

Money, People, Motivation, Idea

“The writer Arundhati Roy asserted that a pregnant Muslim woman had been murdered and then her foetus ripped from her womb by rioters. When it became clear that nobody knew of the incident and Roy was asked to come and help the police inquiry to find the unfortunate victim, she replied through her lawyers that there was no power which could compel her to attend. She claimed in addition that Ehsan Jafri’s daughters had been murdered alongside him at Gulbarg Society. This prompted Jafri’s son to write from the United States that there was only one daughter and she was in the US with him.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Marino, Andy (2014). Narendra Modi: A political biography. Ch. 7.

Help, Daughters

“As the essays kept appearing, so did the five male lawyers (not the same ones, different ones, but they seemed to hunt in packs). And so did the criminal cases, mostly for contempt of court. One of them ended in a very short jail sentence, another is still pending. The debates were often acrimonious. Sometimes violent. But always important. Almost every essay got me into enough trouble to make me promise myself that I wouldn’t write another. But inevitably, situations arose in which the effort of keeping quiet set up such a noise in my head, such an ache in my blood, that I succumbed, and wrote.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Arundhati Roy: Literature provides shelter. That's why we need it (abridged version of her PEN America Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture,) The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america (13 May 2019) Articles

Making love, Effort, Appearance

“The devil may write textbooks of chemistry, for every few years the whole thing changes.”

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) Swedish chemist

Jöns Jakob Berzelius (1779–1848). Nature 162, 210 (1948) doi:10.1038/162210b0

Change

“A lot of my writing is triggered by something true, either something I read in the papers, something I overheard—I am an inveterate eavesdropper—or something that happened in my very large, and very extended, family. And yet it is precisely those things that no one believes are real.”

Petina Gappah (1971) Zimbabwean writer, journalist and business lawyer

On what she typically writes about in “Exclusive interview: Petina Gappah speaks about the highs and lows of her writing career, and reveals details of her next book” https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2017/09/04/exclusive-interview-petina-gappah-speaks-about-the-highs-and-lows-of-her-writing-career-and-reveals-details-of-her-next-book/ in the Johannesburg Review of Books (2017 Sep 4)

Family, Reading

“I learned to write reading North American literature, I love your literature, but I have this feeling that if a country only reads its own literature, it will run out of oxygen.”

Samanta Schweblin (1978) Argentine writer

On her encouraging that Americans read literature beyond their country in “Samanta Schweblin on Revealing Darkness Through Fiction” https://lithub.com/samanta-schweblin-on-revealing-darkness-through-fiction/ in LitHub (2017 Jan 12)

Love, Making love, Feeling, Literature

“The most important opportunity offered by increased exposure is the chance to focus with greater faith and intensity upon the hard work of writing.”

David Chariandy (1969) Canadian writer

On his increased exposure as a writer in “Interviews: David Chariandy” https://bookpage.com/interviews/22971-david-chariandy-fiction#.XfgMUulKjcs in BookPage (2018 Aug 1)

Faith, Chance

“A lot of times, as I like to say, I was the only chip in the cookie…I chose to embrace who I am and what I do, and keep my head down and keep writing, and hoped that things would change. But it was lonely in the sense that I was the only.”

Beverly Jenkins (1951) American author of historical and contemporary romance novels

On being the sole African American romance novelist at the start of her career in “Romance Novelist Beverly Jenkins Talks Normalizing Diversity in Her Genre” https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/books/a12821649/beverly-jenkins-romance-interview/ in Shondaland (2017 Oct 12)

Hope, Sense, Change, Time

“I never intended to write solely about Arab characters, or even primarily about them, but because they were such a big part of my first two novels and my memoir, people reckoned that was my main literary terrain. It wasn’t really a deliberate decision to move away from Arab characters in my later books, but more a desire to paint on a broader canvas, one that was closer to my day-to-day experience.”

Diana Abu-Jaber (1960) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

On character writing in “‘America is not the Final Word:’ An Interview with Diana Abu-Jaber” https://solsticelitmag.org/blog/america-not-final-word-interview-diana-abu-jaber/ in Solstice

People, Books, Decision, Parting

“I think it’s relative to the story you’re writing. Some novels are filled with summary and some are filled with scenes. Others are a beautiful, confusing mix, of course. Ultimately, I wanted to write a novel that I’d want to read later.”

Jon Pineda (1971) American writer

On choosing a story writing method in “7 QUESTIONS WITH JON PINEDA” https://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2018/06/7-questions-jon-pineda in Hyphen Magazine (2018 Jun 7)

Beauty, Thinking, Reading

“He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1950)

Love, Truth, Making love, Hope

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat....”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1950)

Fear, Making love, Question, Problem

“I do not know whether my enemies will reply to me, or adopt the role of silence. Whatever they may do I declare to them that this letter will be my only reply to all their calumnies, past, present or future; and I give my word of honor to the public that whatsoever they may say or do, I shall not write a single line more in my justification.”

Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795) Italian occultist

Postscriptum
Cagliostro’s Letter to the English People (1787)

Silence, Past, Future

“I come up with a concept and might doodle a little bit to get some ideas flowing, but I mostly write and take notes. I write an outline. In a way, I feel like I can make the art fit the story that needs to be told, so I start with the story first.”

Jen Wang (1984) American comics artist

On her creation process in “Q & A with Jen Wang” https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/81155-q-a-with-jen-wang.html in Publishers Weekly (2019 Sep 12)

Making love, Art, Way, Feeling

“Some writers want to write something that doesn’t exist within a time, but I’m not interested in that. I want to capture particular moments in time…I’ve always seen my writing as an attempt to document and be specific in that documentation.”

Morgan Parker (writer) American poet

On her poetry not existing in a vacuum in “You Are on Display: An Interview with Morgan Parker” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/07/22/you-are-on-display-an-interview-with-morgan-parker/ in The Paris Review (2016 Jul 22)

Time

“You’re always, as a journalist, walking this fine line between faithfully representing the complexity of the thing you’re writing about and retaining your readers. The finest piece of journalism in the world is of no use if no one reads it. And getting people to read it requires compromises and sacrifices and all kinds of things. It is very hard to get it perfectly right. But I feel like over time, most good journalists, I think, do a pretty good job of balancing those things…”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

On the challenges of a journalist writing a book in “Malcolm Gladwell on Talking to Strangers and how podcasting changed his approach to writing” https://ew.com/books/2019/09/09/malcolm-gladwell-talking-to-strangers-interview/ in EW (2019 Sep 9)

People, World, Feeling, Thinking

“When it comes to bodies, there is violence done every day. I did not think of body horror as a sub-genre when writing it, but I think the body is a source of great anxiety to each of us. So you shave (legs, armpits, or chin), taking a blade to yourself; perhaps you exercise, causing yourself pain; perhaps you fast or diet, denying yourself; perhaps your job means you have to stay awake. If you think about it, life itself consists of low-levels of body horror all the time. To write fiction, we just exaggerate some of what happens naturally…”

Tade Thompson British science fiction writer

On body horror in “Interview: Tade Thompson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-tade-thompson/ in Lightspeed Magazine (October 2017)

Life, Pain, Exercises, Nature

“I bring everything I know to whatever I write, and I believe the same of other writers. A person’s complete life experience forms the basis of authorial voice, in my opinion. To hold back any part makes a narrative feel contrived.”

Tade Thompson British science fiction writer

On incorporating his medicine background into his writings in “Interview: Tade Thompson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-tade-thompson/ in Lightspeed Magazine (October 2017)

Life, Making love, Feeling, Parting

“Some writers write every morning, or every day. I don´t tend to do that. I am of the Wendy Wasserstein mind. Going to the movies is research. Walking down Central Park and seeing cute boys in tank tops is research. Going to the Museum of Modern Art is research. Having dinner with my best friends is research. Because research, when it comes to being a playwright, most importantly means living. It means experiencing and engaging with the world…”

Christopher Oscar Peña

On his research process in “"a cautionary tale" part II: Interview with Playwright Christopher Oscar Peña” http://www.theaterspeak.org/2013/07/part-ii-of-cautionary-tale-at-flea.html (Theaterspeak; 2013 Jul 15)

World, Art, Boy

“I am a solo flyer. I go by dramatist or playwright. My brand is original plays that take on aspects of our shared American history that have shaped our culture. I write serious plays, but I use as much humor as possible. I also use a lot of music (original and found), and I’m not afraid to examine my characters’ sexuality…”

Oliver Mayer Mexican American writer

On his writings in “Meet Oliver Mayer” http://voyagela.com/interview/meet-oliver-mayer-playwright-south-los-angelesusc/ in VoyageLA (2019 Jan 8)

Music, History

“I had Chavo Guerrero in mind a lot when I was writing this play…Chavo’s job was to make guys look better than they were, which meant he lost a lot. And he was so skilled at it that there weren’t a lot of guys who could play that same fall-guy role for him so that he could be the champion.”

Kristoffer Diaz American writer

On the inspiration for his play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity in “Playwright Kristoffer Diaz steps into the ring” https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-chad-deity-20110821-story.html in the Los Angeles Times (2011 Aug 21)

Making love, Guy

“If you tell stories about a really cool kid that you can relate to, and then you hear about kids being mean to that kid, then you feel what it is like to walk in his shoes. And you think, that is not right. I think the best way to write is to want to build empathy for your characters. You want the readers to feel the things they are feeling.”

R. J. Palacio (1963) American author

On thinking about kids who are different in “Author R.J. Palacio talks to LI kids” https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/family/kidsday/rj-palacio-wonder-author-interview-1.20364470 in Newsday (2018 Aug 8)

Shoe, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“They were human beings who had a life, who had a lineage, who had parents, who had children, who had lives. They were not poor or rich. They were people and these people had humanity. So it was important that someone who knew them write about the event…”

Dany Laferrière (1953) Haitian Canadian novelist and journalist

On reporting about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti in “An Interview with Dany Laferrière” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/an-interview-with-dany-laferriere-jessie-chaffee (WWB Daily, 2016)

Life, Children, People, Parent

“How I began to write is different than how I became a writer. They are two different things. Many people write but they do not become writers. To become a writer is a job. It involves planning and it affects all parts of your life. Even what you eat—being a writer means not eating food with too much rich sauce to avoid taking a long afternoon nap! It’s like being a professional athlete. And a writer must choose between being a sprinter who writes a book, and being a writer who creates an oeuvre. If you want to create an oeuvre, you have to be careful not to put all your energy into the first book. You have to have a vision for the long term...”

Dany Laferrière (1953) Haitian Canadian novelist and journalist

On how he became a writer in “An Interview with Dany Laferrière” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/an-interview-with-dany-laferriere-jessie-chaffee (WWB Daily, 2016)

Life, People, Books, Food

“The relationship between reader and writer in fiction is steeped in vulnerabilities. It really does require trust and faith because some books have the power to transform people. You feel like you can never go back, look at the world in the same way again. And that grand ambition is what I hope to do with my books because at the heart of my writing is a passion for telling stories of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the misunderstood.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

On being a writer in “Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/both-freedom-and-constraint-an-interview-with in Words Without Borders (May 2015)

People, Books, World, Faith

“Distance in time has made my voice less contrived and subjective. I don’t feel I’m writing some kind of diary (which I kind of felt I was doing when I was 16). I am far more conscious of my voice and more disciplined in separating myself from my characters…”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

On how it has changed for her writing in a teenager’s voice in “Randa Abdel-Fattah: Identity and emotion” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/randa-abdel-fattah/ in The Writer (2018 Jan 18)

Feeling, Time

“The world of adolescence was all I was interested in exploring, I suppose because there is no other period in your life when you feel as intensely. Love, hate, jealousy, loyalty: I remember the power of these emotions as a teenager and how navigating questions of identity at the same time was truly terrifying and exhilarating. Writing in that moment of a person’s life has always felt so right to me.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

On writing young adult novels in “Randa Abdel-Fattah: Identity and emotion” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/randa-abdel-fattah/ in The Writer (2018 Jan 18)

Love, Life, Hate, World

“But my object in writing this letter is not to ventilate my grievances. It is to place before you my reaction to the war situation. The latest development seems to be most serious. Want of truthful news is tantalizing. I suppose it is inevitable. But assuming that things are as black as they appear to be for the Allied cause, is it not time to sue for peace for the sake of humanity? I do not believe Herr Hitler to be as bad as he is portrayed. He might even have been a friendly power as he may still be. It is due to suffering humanity that this mad slaughter should stop.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

LETTER TO [the viceroy of India] LORD LINLITHGOW , May 26, 1940 p. 253 (Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), vol. 78, https://www.gandhiservefoundation.org/about-mahatma-gandhi/collected-works-of-mahatma-gandhi/ 1940s

War, Bad luck, Truth, Peace

“As writers, of course we’re interested in human beings, human stories, human trauma, and all that is very compelling for readers. But when we write these powerful stories about individual people, we have the illusion that we’ve made a difference. And of course we have—people read the books, they’re touched emotionally by these kinds of stories, and that’s great. But to the extent that the stories that we’re telling are about people who are weaker, in some way—they come from a small country, or a forcibly removed population, they’re underrepresented collectively—individual stories don’t change the conditions that produce those refugees in the first place…”

Viet Thanh Nguyen (1971) American author of fiction

On writers overestimating the difference that their writings make in “An interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen” https://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-viet-thanh-nguyen/ in Asymptote Magazine

People, Books, Way, Change

“All through my childhood, I wanted to be a novelist. I stopped writing at various points because I would get frustrated because there were things I didn’t know how to do. I didn’t know how to move a story through time. Pacing. My character would enter a room and need to get across the room to the action, and I would walk her ploddingly across the room. I didn’t know how to move the plot along quickly and efficiently through time…”

Ruth Ozeki (1956) American writer

On her initial struggles to become a novelist in “Ruth Ozeki: Neither here nor there” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/ruth-ozeki-neither/ in The Writer (2017 Feb 24)

Time, Childhood

“I’ve never considered myself a strong reader or writer. When I was younger, I had some hardships with reading and writing, and I never thought of myself as someone who could pull this off. To a degree it was challenging. In my everyday life, I’m pretty private and reserved, so the hardest part was taking personal emotion and putting it on the page and putting myself out there…”

Ian Purkayastha (1992)

On writing his book Truffle Boy in “Ian Purkayastha: How I Write” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/ian-purkayastha-write/ in The Writer (2017 Aug 7)

Life, Strong, Reading, Parting

“When I read, if I don’t know where a story is set, I always feel unmoored. The same is true for my writing: Until I place my story in a specific place, I can’t get my footing in the world…”

Kirstin Valdez Quade American writer

On the importance of location in her writings in “Kirstin Valdez Quade: How I Write” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/kirstin-valdez-quade/ in The Writer (2017 Apr 21)

World, Feeling, Reading

“I think it is a natural impulse to look to your own past and history to discover the stories that move and inspire you. The problem is that the past is nebulous and waiting for a shape. What ultimately gives it form and context is the present. That’s the part of writing inspired by personal history that is exciting to me.”

Stephanie Powell Watts

On using personal history in “Fruits of the Same Tree: An Interview with Stephanie Powell Watts” https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-stephanie-powell-watts/ in Fiction Writers Review (2012 Aug 6)

History, Nature, Problem, Thinking

“I am often inspired by actors and I fall in love with them, so I write towards their strengths and gifts. Sometimes, it is merely about logic and making sense of the poetry in my head and how it translates that can be hard to articulate…”

Luis Alfaro (1963) Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist

On the challenges of the writing process in “BWW Interview: Acclaimed Playwright Luis Alfaro of OEDIPUS EL REY at Magic Theatre Talks about His Path & the Role of the Artist in Creating Change” https://www.broadwayworld.com/san-francisco/article/BWW-Interview-Acclaimed-Playwright-Luis-Alfaro-of-OEDIPUS-EL-REY-at-Magic-Theatre-Talks-about-His-Path-the-Role-of-the-Artist-in-Creating-Change-20190614 in Broadway World (2010 Jun 14)

Love, Making love, Sense

“A play is like a free-flowing poem in some ways. The play, as you write, will tell you what the structure will be. But, sometimes you forget to ask those questions as you write and you end up spending a lot of time trying to find the essence of the play…”

Mando Alvarado actor

On how playwriting differs from television writing in “SIN MUROS: INTERVIEW WITH “LIVING SCULPTURE” PLAYWRIGHT MANDO ALVARADO” https://thetheatretimes.com/sin-muros-interview-living-sculpture-playwright-mando-alvarado/ in The Theatre Times

Way, Question, Time, Forgetting

“I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth... but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.”

August Kekulé (1829–1896) German organic chemist

Account of his famous dream of the benzene structure, as quoted in A Life of Magic Chemistry : Autobiographical Reflections of a Nobel Prize Winner (2001) by George A. Olah, p. 54

Truth, Dreams, Understanding, Learning

“Sylvia went furthest in the sense that her secret was most dangerous to her. She desperately needed to reveal it. You can’t overestimate her compulsion to write like that. She had to write those things — even against her most vital interests. She died before she knew what The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems were going to do to her life, but she had to get them out. She had to tell everybody... like those Native American groups who periodically told everything that was wrong and painful in their lives in the presence of the whole tribe. It was no good doing it in secret; it had to be done in front of everybody else. Maybe that’s why poets go to such lengths to get their poems published. It’s no good whispering them to a priest or a confessional. And it’s not for fame, because they go on doing it after they’ve learned what fame amounts to. No, until the revelation’s actually published, the poet feels no release. In all that, Sylvia was an extreme case, I think.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

The Paris Review interview

Life, Pain, Secret, Feeling

“Great drama, drama that may reach the alchemical level, must have dimension and its relevance will take care of itself. Writing about AIDS rather than the cocktail set, or possibly the fairy kingdom, will not guarantee importance.... The old comment that all periods of time are at an equal distance from eternity says much, and pondering on it will lead to alchemical theatre while relevance becomes old hat.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Alchemy in the Theatre (1994).

Time

“Ever since I have been writing on secularism and religious conflict, and particularly about Islam, I have had plenty of mud thrown at me. What I have never seen so far is an actual refutation of my central theses.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2010s, The argumentative Hindu (2012)

“The written word is holy…When we write our stories, it helps us bring understanding.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

On the importance of gaining knowledge in “Author Victor Villaseñor talks 'Crazy Loco'” https://www.lmtonline.com/que_pasa/article/Author-Victor-Villase-or-talks-Crazy-Loco-10268363.php in LMT Online (2008 Dec 11)

Understanding, Help

“No one in a productive society wants you to know there ways of looking at the world other than their ways, and among the effects drugs may have is that of switching a mind from the normal track. Reading the works of certain writers has a corresponding effect. When receptive individuals explore the writings of someone such as Lovecraft, they are majestically solaced to find articulations of existence countering those to which the heads around them have become habituated.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

World, Way, Reading

“The Frontier tribesmen are acutely sensitive to the appeal of religion and when a well-known Mullah started to preach against the Hindus…, his words fell on fruitful ground. He called upon the Afridis and Shinwaris to expel all the Hindus living in their midst unless they declared in writing that they dissociated themselves from the doings of their co-religionists down country…. This expulsion and voluntary exodus from tribal territory were without parallel. Hindus had lived there for more generations than most of them could record as valued and respected, and, indeed, as essential members of the tribal system, for whose protection the tribesmen had been jealous, and whose blood feuds they commonly made their own.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Source: Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946), Chapter 7

Religion, Country

“There were the Chârvâkas, who preached horrible things, the most rank, undisguised materialism, such as in the nineteenth century they dare not openly preach. These Charvakas were allowed to preach from temple to temple, and city to city, that religion was all nonsense, that it was priestcraft, that the Vedas were the words and writings of fools, rogues, and demons, and that there was neither God nor an eternal soul. If there was a soul, why did it not come back after death drawn by the love of wife and child. Their idea was that if there was a soul it must still love after death, and want good things to eat and nice dress. Yet no one hurt these Charvakas.”

Charvaka An unorthodox school of Hindu philosophy

Swami Vivekananda as recorded in the complete works of Swami Vivekananda https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_2/Jnana-Yoga/Maya_and_the_Evolution_of_the_Conception_of_God.

Love, Death, God, Making love

“They were the citizens of free and independent nations, united by their duty to their compatriots and to millions yet unborn. There were the British, whose nobility and fortitude saw them through the worst of Dunkirk and the London Blitz. The full violence of Nazi fury was no match for the full grandeur of British pride. Thank you. There were the Canadians, whose robust sense of honor and loyalty compelled them to take up arms alongside Britain from the very, very beginning. There were the fighting Poles, the tough Norwegians, and the intrepid Aussies. There were the gallant French commandos, soon to be met by thousands of their brave countrymen ready to write a new chapter in the long history of French valor. And finally, there were the Americans. They came from the farms of a vast heartland, the streets of glowing cities and the forges of mighty industrial towns. Before the war, many had never ventured beyond their own community. Now they had come to offer their lives half a world from home.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2019, June, Remarks on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day in Colleville-sur-Mer, France

War, World, Home, History

“It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: 1910s, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), ch. 15.

Mathematics

“It’s no accident that so many fabled rock ensembles have had two contrasting leaders (Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Plant and Page, Bono and The Edge) to play off each other and cross-pollinate and, at times, butt heads. But Chris Martin completely dominates Coldplay; there’s no yin to his smiley enraptured yang. He’s the rock-king superstar the other band members all worship, humbly, as the genius who made their fates possible, and almost every moment of the band’s creative energy is organized around what Chris is going to do next: the piano chords he’s playing around with, the lyrics he’s writing, his endless studio perfectionism.”

Chris Martin (1977) musician, co-founder of Coldplay

http://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/coldplay-a-head-full-of-dreams-review-1203031635/ source

Fate, Time

“Subjectivism, sectarianism and stereotyped Party writing are no longer the dominant styles, but merely gusts of contrary wind, ill winds from the air-raid tunnels.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

"Rectify the Party's Style of Work" (1942)
Original: (zh-CN) 主观主义、宗派主义、党八股，现在已不是占统治地位的作风了，这不过是一股逆风，一股歪风，是从防空洞里跑出来的。 note: "整顿党的作风"

“We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing — still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Closing words
The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

Nature, Knowledge, Thinking, Change

“I want to write to the Guinness Book of World Records that Manmohan Singh is the only Prime Minister of India among the eleven Prime Ministers that the country had who has not won even a municipal election. What is he going to tell me? Manmohan Singh is a nominated Prime Minister. He is not a representative of the people of India.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

Natwar Singh, former External Affairs Minister, "Manmohan hasn't even won an election: Natwar" http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Manmohan-hasnt-even-won-an-election-Natwar/articleshow/1878602.cms, The Times of India (9 August 2009)

People, Books, World, Country

“The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.
"The Creation Myths of Cooperstown", p. 46
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Men, History, Sport

“I didn’t start writing to tell happy, little stories. I started writing to make some impact on the world in which I live. If you don’t want to say anything about sexual assault, that’s your business, but I want to say something about it. I think it is absolutely and unequivocally wrong. We have no right because we are in the military to rape fellow soldiers who just happen to be females. A lot of victims are male as well. In the Army I was in, the life of the person next to you was as valuable as your own. You would never do anything to hurt your comrade. Your life depended on him, and in the case of Iraq, those gentlemen’s lives depended on the women they were raping. It’s horrifying.”

Charles Fuller (1939–2022) American playwright

On writing about a female sexual assault victim serving in the military in his play One Night in “Charles Fuller Discusses ‘One Night’” https://catf.org/charles-fuller-discusses-one-night/ in Contemporary American Theater Festival (2014 Jun 1)

Life, Women, Happiness, World

“Art is something you don’t just reproduce—what you see everyday doesn’t seem to be inspiring to them. But you do something with it so that it’s not bound by the law of reality. My work has always had that influence. I’ve never felt that it was necessary at all to write realistic plays…”

María Irene Fornés (1930–2018) American writer

On how her work (and other Latin American artists) tend to gear towards surrealism in “María Irene Fornés by Allen Frame” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/maria-irene-fornes/ in BOMB Magazine (1984 Oct 1)

Law, Art, Reality

“My plays are clean. Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it…”

María Irene Fornés (1930–2018) American writer

On avoiding the typical play structures in “María Irene Fornés by Allen Frame” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/maria-irene-fornes/ in BOMB Magazine (1984 Oct 1)

Sense, Sleep

“I can only respond as an artist, because that’s what I am. I’m not going to become a politician all of a sudden. I am a politician in terms of the plays that I write, the way I embrace culture, the way I embrace characters that, in my particular case, have to do with the Latino world. And I embrace the Latino experience…”

Nilo Cruz (1960) American playwright

On whether he feels pressured to represent the Latino community after winning a Pulitzer in “Nilo Cruz by Emily Mann” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/nilo-cruz/ in BOMB Magazine (2004 Jan 1)

World, Way

“I wanted to write a play about racism, about poverty, about the negative forces that haunt us and make us murderous—and the positive forces that do daily battle for us—like love, friendship, family—which lead to some kind of hope…”

Migdalia Cruz (1958) American writer

On what motivated her to write the play El Grito in “INTERVIEW WITH MIGDALIA CRUZ, PLAYWRIGHT” https://collaboraction.typepad.com/collaboraction/2009/07/interview-with-migdalia-cruz-playwright.html in Collaboraction

Love, Friendship, Making love, Family

“I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.”

August Wilson (1945–2005) American playwright

On what attracted him to theater in “August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/839/august-wilson-the-art-of-theater-no-14-august-wilson in The Paris Review (Winter 1999)

People, Communication, Idea, Nature

“There is less trouble and trauma involved in writing a new piece than in trying to salvage an unsatisfactory old one.”

Isaac Asimov book In Memory Yet Green

In Memory Yet Green (1979), p. 200
General sources

“Science Digest asked me to see the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and write an article for them on the science it contained. I saw the picture and was appalled. I remained appalled even after a doctor’s examination had assured me that no internal organs had been shaken loose by its ridiculous soundwaves. (If you can’t be good, be loud, some say, and Close Encounters was very loud.) … Hollywood must deal with large audiences, most of whom are utterly unfamiliar with good science fiction. It has to bend to them, meet them at least half-way. Fully appreciating that, I could enjoy Planet of the Apes and Star Wars.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Star Wars was entertainment for the masses and did not try to be anything more. Leave your sophistication at the door, get into the spirit, and you can have a fun ride. … Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions, or reading a bad book for the dirty parts. Optical wizardry is something a movie can do that a book can’t but it is no substitute for a story, for logic, for meaning. It is ornamentation, not substance. In fact, whenever a science fiction picture is praised overeffusively for its special effects, I know it’s a bad picture. Is that all they can find to talk about? "Editorial: The Reluctant Critic", in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 6, (12 November 1978) https://archive.org/stream/Asimovs_v02n06_1978-11-12/ General sources

War, Way, Star, Science

“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)

People, Age, Law, History

“A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)

Appearance, Reading

“I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit of those who write for them: and I enclose you a recent sample, the production of a New England judge, as a proof of the abyss of degradation into which we are fallen. These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief. That this has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit I agree with you…”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Walter Jones (2 January 1814) https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0052. 1810s

Food

“Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to…well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let’s call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it’s possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it’s possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 12, “Power Breakfast” (p. 254)

Law, Nature, Universe

“Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It’s bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it’s full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don’t understand what’s going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to the IT department.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Ken MacLeod in Introduction: Charlie’s Demons (p. xvi)
The Laundry Files, The Atrocity Archives (2004)

Money, People, World, Making love

“Writing for TV was a huge influence on this book, partly because you realize in casting what a vast gap there was between who people are and who they play. You sometimes see Shakespearan trained actors playing janitors. And at the same time, I’ve seen actresses who are really well known for playing wealthy, super cultured women come in and they are well, let’s just say the exact opposite.”

Veronica Chambers (1970) writer

On how writing for television influenced her novel The Go-Between in “Author Interview: Veronica Chambers questions Mexican immigrant stereotypes in ‘The Go-Between’” https://www.hypable.com/author-interview-veronica-chambers-the-go-between/ in Hypable (2017 May 9)

Women, People, Books, Time

“The advice to any young poet is to embrace your freedom and not feel constrained to write in one particular way or only about one particular topic. If they’re Latino poets, I would encourage them not only to read widely, but also to read Latino poetry, to familiarize themselves with their particular tradition within American literature…”

Francisco Aragón (1968) poet

On his advice to Latino poets in “Interview with Francisco Aragón: Latino Poetry From All Its Perspectives” https://www.sampsoniaway.org/literary-voices/2010/09/16/interview-with-francisco-aragon-latino-poetry-from-all-its-perspectives/ in Sampsonia Way (2010 Sept 16)

Way, Feeling, Literature, Freedom

“When I started to make translations I was just doing it intuitively, and my tendency was to stick to the original as much as possible. Then I gained more confidence in my own poetry and my own writing and I began to become less concerned about being strictly faithful to the original and more concerned with producing a good poem in English. What I have often found—especially in the translations that are done by scholars—is that they’re very faithful to the content of the original language, but in English they don’t really sound that good as poems.”

Francisco Aragón (1968) poet

On translating Spanish poetry into English in “Interview with Francisco Aragón: Latino Poetry From All Its Perspectives” https://www.sampsoniaway.org/literary-voices/2010/09/16/interview-with-francisco-aragon-latino-poetry-from-all-its-perspectives/ in Sampsonia Way (2010 Sept 16)

Making love, Faith, Confidence, Self-confidence

“I wrote the book just after Zimbabwe’s independence to encourage young Zimbabweans to develop themselves in spite of the challenges they would face doing so. There was also a lot of talk after independence of going back to one’s cultural roots. I wanted to interrogate that idea by examining aspects of the culture we were being told to go back to that affected women in my environment negatively. I was a newly minted feminist at the time and very eager. I also wanted to look at the ongoing effects of colonialism in the new dispensation. At the same time, I hoped to write a book that would be eminently readable, with recognizable characters.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959) Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

On what she had hoped to convey with her first novel Nervous Conditions in “A Crisis of Personhood: Tsitsi Dangarembga by Bhakti Shringarpure” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/tsitsi-dangaremgba/ in BOMB Magazine (2019 Sep 27)

Women, Books, Hope, Idea

“The skills I had learned for prose didn’t work in film. Those telling details, they’re completely different. Or the fact of these inner monologues in which you can write a whole book. Whereas prose is teasing out, film is stripping down, concentrating and compacting. I found I could not learn the one while doing the other. So it was a big struggle, actually. It took me years.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959) Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

On adjusting to film writing in “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga: An excerpt” https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-tsitsi-dangarembga/ in Brick Magazine (December 2012)

Books, Learning

“I still feel that style is important for reading pleasure, and sex is important for pleasure in life. Each appeases a different type of desire. And while I find nothing shameful in taking direct erotic pleasure from reading or writing, I don’t think they entail a necessary relation. The processes you have me describing are contingent psychological processes. Neither marks one end nor the other of any necessary or even philosophical relationship…”

Samuel R. Delany (1942) American author, professor and literary critic

On including sexual themes in his writings in “Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6088/samuel-r-delany-the-art-of-fiction-no-210-samuel-r-delany in The Paris Review (Summer 2011)

Life, Pleasure, Sex, Feeling

“I didn’t want to write it in OED English…As I was writing more and more I was aware that I was having it filtered through to me from various languages, various religions, various countries, and so in a sense I wanted to present it from this Western, global perspective, to try and capture something multicultural.”

Daljit Nagra (1966) British poet, teacher and broadcaster

On the specific English that he chose for his writings in “Daljit Nagra interview: Yoda-speak and Yorkshire voices” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10402180/Daljit-Nagra-interview-Yoda-speak-and-Yorkshire-voices.html in The Telegraph (2013 Oct 24)

Religion, Sense, Country

“The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people who can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

[Morgan, Forrest, Shakespeare—the Man, published in the Prospective Review, July 1853, The works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, 1891, Hartford, Connecticut, Travelers Insurance Company, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101064786716;view=1up;seq=373, 265–266 of 255–302]
Shakespeare—the Man (1853)

Life, People, Books, Way

“Burkard Schliessmann is a fiercely intellectual pianist. He’s intellectual in two senses. First, he approaches this music with a tremendous store of background knowledge - knowledge about the composers and their works, about their early receptions, about their critical writings, about their literary inspirations, and about the cultural milieu in which they found themselves. Second, he performs the music with a rigorous sense of the ways its details contribute to its form, both in terms of its overall architecture and in terms of its vertical structure.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Peter J. Rabinowitz in Fanfare - The Magazin for Serious Record Collectors, USA, January/February 2011, Chopin-Schumann Anniversary Edition 2010 in the interpretation of Burkard Schliessmann, Volume 34, Number 3, p. 255

Music, Way, Knowledge, Sense