All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.”

“May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It’s like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith – where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO’s stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. “Dead From the Waist Down” on MTV. The humidity’s making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it “skin hunger”. I feel like I’m building up a charge. Monsoon’s on its way.”

“The voice of a Black woman should always be HERSELF …No edits – no erasure – no pressure – no expectations – no additions – no intruders”

“The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob, before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”

“How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn’t there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own?”

“Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal”

“I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional … My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.”

“The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It’s in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.”

“ What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one’s life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death. I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.”

“I intend all my characters must escape from impossible situations; if they are not in trouble, then as a writer, I am.”

“The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?”

“Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.”

“Stories do not change the world. I’ve learned that. But perhaps in some secret, subtle way…. I mean it’s not the world I want to change.”

“And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation … Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant.”

“I work my inspiration til I find a spark of life in it I draw on it I siphon it I earn my multi-hyphenate.”