Category Archives: Quotes

Like Snowflakes

And yet there is and will always be some beauty in books. And there will always be people who appreciate that beauty. Even if books eventually become the province of collectors and the peculiar few who fetishize them as objects, there will be attractive qualities to them. They are something like snowflakes or at least stamps, so many and so few alike.

—C. Max Magee


Looking Out the Window

It’s important to have space in which to think. Yesterday, I overheard someone complain, “I left my Blackberry at home, so I was so bored during my cab ride home. I just had to sit there.”

There are few things that I love more than looking out the window of a car, train, or bus. One day, when I was gazing out of a bus window, I was struck by a thought: “What do I want out of life?” “Well,” I thought, “I want to be happy.” … If I’d been checking my emails, I might never have had the idea for the happiness project.

—Gretchen Rubin

Hatched from an egg

But first, my rule. I will never, ever ask a writer where she gets her ideas. I don’t care. I don’t care if the work is autobiographical, divined by magic, or hatched from an egg. The answers to these questions are rarely illuminating about the works themselves as much as they tell us what we want to know about an author. And just because we want to know doesn’t mean that it does us any good to do so.

—Kerry Clare

Workcrastination

You know how sometimes you read something and it’s like, wait, did I write that?

[Workcrastination] is when you blow off your novel for important stuff that needs doing, not fun stuff, but neccesary stuff. For example, right now. I know I need to be working on my novel, but I am doing things like grading student papers. (It must be done! It’s my job!), paying bills (It’s the first of the month!), etc.

—Tayari Jones

Drunk, mad, sex-obsessed geniuses

“Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well enough alone? Why aren’t the books enough?” Julian Barnes poses these questions in Flaubert’s Parrot, his fictional biography of Gustave Flaubert. Perhaps, as readers, we enjoy the amateur detective work that literary biographies offer. We like to excavate the lives of famous authors and uncover the experiences that might have shaped their stories.

The problem is, writers’ lives don’t always make for great cinema. If writers are any good, it’s usually because they spend weeks alone, in a room, with a computer (or paper if they’re old-school).

Literary biopics usually cater to the fantasy that writers are drunk, mad, sex-obsessed geniuses inspired by the holy spirit (50% proof).

—Evan Maloney

Way Too Scary

Enlightened sexism is feminist in its outward appearance (of course you can be or do anything you want) but sexist in its intent (hold on, girls, only up to a certain point, and not in any way that discomfits men). While enlightened sexism seems to support women’s equality, it is dedicated to the undoing of feminism. In fact, because this equality might lead to “sameness”–way too scary–girls and women need to be reminded that they are still fundamentally female, and so must be emphatically feminine.

Thus, enlightened sexism takes the gains of the women’s movement as a given, and then uses them as permission to resurrect retrograde images of girls and women as sex objects, still defined by their appearance and their biological destiny.

—Susan J. Douglas

See, for example, commentary here, here, and here on the ridiculous tabloid stories about Shiloh Jolie-Pitt’s clothing choices. She’s a three years old, people. Also, for everyone whose memory and judgment has been clouded by the past decade’s onslaught of pinnnnkkkk, that’s how all little kids used to dress in the seventies and eighties. In other words, there are most likely pictures of you dressed just like Shiloh in your family photo albums.

Own your one star reviews

I think it’s useful for all us writers to remember no one work pleases everyone, and you can’t make anyone like it if they don’t, and you can’t keep them from telling other people what they think of it, even if they hate it… and that’s fine. Learn to deal with it. Otherwise it doesn’t matter how much success or praise or satisfaction you earn through your writing, you’ll still obsess over those one-star reviews and it will eat away at your joy. That’s no way to live.

So: own your one star reviews, don’t let them own you. And once you own them, let ‘em go. You’ll feel better, and you’ll worry less about them going forward. Try it for yourself. You’ll see.

—John Scalzi