We are all of us like that boy sometimes. I mean we all carry something inside us that can be rejected; that can look silver in the light. You can deny it, or try and throw it in the garbage by all means. You can despise it so much you drink yourself halfway to death. At the end of the day, though,…
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Quotes tagged ‘Writers’
I made a wasteland out of everything I touched.
I'm afraid, mortally afraid... that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that's how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.
In her loving and sometimes shocking memoir, 'What It Used To Be Like', Maryann Buck Carver remembered an argument the couple had a few days after their wedding, in which her new husband announced that he regretted marrying and would always choose writing over her. Swallowing her own ambition, she d…
It had struck me a long time back that the dream of letting go into water is prevalent in the work of alcoholic writers. I'd been collecting them up, these little fantasies of cleanliness, purification, dissolution and death. Some were healthful: antidotes to a kind of felt dirtiness gathering elsew…
I sense in some small part of myself how pleasurable it might be to let alcohol unhinge you, to take you down into an unreachable, sunken place, where sounds are very muted.
As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for anxiety, and inevitably becomes the victim of crushing phobias that can only be allayed by crushing doses of heroin or alcohol.
We are told stories as children to help us bridge the abyss between waking and sleeping. We tell stories to our own children for the same purpose. When I find myself in danger -- caught on a stuck ski-lift in a blizzard -- I immediately start telling myself stories. I tell myself stories when I am i…
It wasn't the death he'd hope for, either way.
I wanted time to think, and what I wanted to think about was alcohol.
Mark Twain, another American icon, is a great example of this. His fans loved him during his lifetime because he shared his constant imperfection and evolution, along with his changeless trademark wit. The comfortable, frizzy-haired, cigar-toting wisecracker in a white suit dates only from the very…
I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.
Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.
Look, we can’t all be Joan Didion.
Why should Apple shareholders be getting rich while working journalists are getting fired? This is an unjust situation, and the libertarians in Silicon Valley are either moral idiots or liars.
I think the tech corporations are like the nineteenth-century coal magnates, and the freelance writers are like the people slaving in the mines, the only difference being that the tech corporations can't stop congratulating themselves on how they've liberated everybody.
Who said it's the writer's job to be liked by everybody?
I haven't googled myself since the fall of 2001.
The publishing industry looks a lot like one of these bestselling teenage dystopias: white and full of people destroying one another to survive.
The market, I am told, just doesn't demand this kind of book... because white kids won't buy a book with a black kid on the cover -- or so The Market says, despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way.