"I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me."
— Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text. [via proustitute] (via skibinskipedia)
(via electronicalrattlebag)
"Writing isn’t just telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling everything at once. It’s the telling of a story, and the absence of a story. It’s telling a story through its absence."
— Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (via secretfragileskies)
"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
— Henry James (via hereisthenode)
“I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing- a sunset or an old shoe- in absolute and simple amazement.”
- Raymond Carver
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale."
— D.H. Lawrence (via theories-of)
"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."
— Joan Didion, “Why I Write” (via sayyes)
The very question of where Kafka belongs is already something of a scandal given the fact that the writing charts the vicissitudes of non-belonging, or of belonging too much. Remember: he broke every engagement he ever had, he never owned an apartment, and he asked his literary executor to destroy his papers, after which that contractual relation was to have ended.
- Who Owns Kafka?, Judith Butler
hope for bookkeepers
When Don Quixote is dubbed a knight – a key moment in the history of the novel – the local innkeeper swears him in on an account book. Balzac is known to have kept on his bookshelf, beside the published edition of his Contes Drolatique (Droll Tales), a black-bound volume titled Comptes Mélancoliques (Melancholy Accounts): a compendium of his debts. What is the secret relationship between double-entry bookkeeping and the novel?
In the story Elif Batuman tells, these two writing practices originate from a single historical moment and a single historical urge: the impossible desire to write at the rate of life itself. Cervantes, who worked for seven years as a bookkeeper for the Spanish Armada, was the first to give novelistic shape to this desire – which Balzac, an erstwhile clerk, experienced perhaps more intensely than any other novelist. This lecture will trace the theme of double-entry in the life and work of these two literary giants.
(LRB)
"The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination; but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations, works of art, were the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes, just as dreams are; and like them they were in the nature of compromises, since they too were forced to avoid any open conflict with the forces of repression. But they differed, from the asocial, narcissistic products of dreaming in that they were calculated to arouse sympathetic interest in other people and were able to evoke and to satisfy the same unconscious wishful impulses in them too."
— Freud, An Autobiographical Study (via tendingtotend)
(via leprintemps)
