May 2011
2 posts
April 2011
7 posts
March 2011
2 posts
“And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a...”
– http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw
“He says: when you go to a Cuban marketplace, your first instinct is to catalog...”
– http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-interviews/george_saunders_interview_20070831/
January 2011
1 post
December 2010
3 posts
November 2010
3 posts
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit...”
– Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 21, Ernest Hemingway (via Instapaper)
October 2010
5 posts
Gay Talese on Sinatra's Unpredictability
From arguably the best profile ever written:
A young lady named Jane Hoag, a reporter at Life’s Los Angeles bureau who had attended the same school as Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy, had once been invited to a party at Mrs. Sinatra’s California home at which Frank Sinatra, who maintains very cordial relations with his former wife, acted as host. Early in the party Miss Hoag, while...
September 2010
3 posts
“Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down,...”
– Dave Eggers
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears...”
– Thoreau
“I’ve been guessing that being offline will soon be the new luxury. Expensive...”
– A Kind of Vast Fiction [longform.org] (via Instapaper)
July 2010
5 posts
June 2010
11 posts
“Literature is news that stays news.”
– Ezra Pound
Anthony Lane on Patrick Leigh Fermor
There is nouniversal term for it—for the elegant, un-complaining angle at which Leigh Fermor and his kind stand in relation to the world—although, fittingly, the best approximation is in Greek. The word leventiá, he writes in *Roumeli*, “comprises the dash and fire of youth, a cheerful temperament, courage, speed, quick reactions, good looks, skill in singing, dancing, marksmanship, capacity...
Lionel Trilling on Huck Finn
Mark Twain said of Tom Sawyer that it ‘is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a wordly air.’ He might have said the same, and with even more reason, of Huckleberry Finn, which is a hymn to an older America forever gone, an America which had its great national faults, which was full of violence and even of cruelty, but which still maintained its sense of reality, for it was not yet...
Melville on the urge to wander
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and...
Patrick Leigh Fermor on Travel
But even if there had been less to like, I would have felt warmly towards them: I was abroad at last, far from my familiar habitat and separated by sea from the tangles of the past; and all this, combined with the wild and growing exhileration of the journey, shed a golden radiance.
January 2010
1 post
December 2009
1 post
Sholem Aleichem
Sholem Aleichem died in New York in 1916, aged 57, while still working on his last novel, Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son, and was laid to rest at Mount Carmel cemetery in Queens. At the time, his funeral was one of the largest in New York City history, with an estimated 100,000 mourners. The next day, his will was printed in the New York Times and was read into the Congressional Record of the...
November 2009
13 posts
The simple life
is the good life. And yet, why is it so hard to achieve?
If tacos don't come with onions and cilantro
they’re not the real thing.
