“You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like, discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.”
Roddy Doyle’s Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
If you’ve never read any Roddy Doyle, you’re in for a treat. From the exquisite Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha to the more famous Commitments from The Barrytown Trilogy. Roddy has the ability to inhabit his characters so seamlessly that when I read The Woman Who Walked into Doors I was convinced the author was female. Then […]
Rainer Maria Rilke on Trusting in Nature, Loving Small Things & Living Questions
In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, …even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they […]
Ursula K. Le Guin on Where We Get Our Ideas From
It’s a big question—where do writers get their ideas, where do artists get their visions, where do musicians get their music? It’s bound to have a big answer. Or a whole lot of them. One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought up his tunes, and he said, “The air is […]
Madeleine L’Engle on the 3 Most Important Things for Writers
“I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think […]
Anais Nin on June Miller—& a Rare Radio Interview
“Words and certain languages and certain rhythms belong to certain personalities — the writing takes on the color of the certain personality that I describe.” ~ Anaïs Nin Listen to a rare interview with Anaïs Nin Frank Roberts of KPFK radio interviews Anaïs Nin, following the publication of the first volume of her eponymous diary in 1966. […]
Julia Cameron on Why We Should Write
“We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of […]
Mark Strand on Being in Creative Flow
“[When] you’re right in the work, you lose your sense of time… You’re completely enraptured, You’re completely caught up in what you’re doing, and you’re sort of swayed by the possibilities you see in this work. If that becomes too powerful, then you get up, because the excitement is too great. You can’t continue to […]
George Saunders’ Short Animated Documentary on the Art of Storytelling
“A good story is one that says, at many different levels, ‘we’re both human beings, we’re in this crazy situation called life, that we don’t really understand. Can we put our heads together and confer about it a little bit at a very high, non-bullshitty level?’ Then, all kinds of magic can happen.” ~ George Saunders […]
Diane Ackerman on Truly Living Our Lives
“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat an unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, […]