Category: Writing

Today’s One-Liner (#172)

The basic function of literature, as far as I can say, is to entertain the spirit in a very big way. —Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell, p. 75.

Writing Daily

Often quoting Stendhal to the effect that one should “write every day, whether inspired or not,” Alain encouraged his students to sit down at a desk and write prolifically, as he did, at least two…

Today’s One-Liner (#95)

I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. –Natalie Goldberg, Writing down the Bones

Genres

[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping.  A card index of all imaginable inhumanities.  Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…

Look Within

In a sense, everything Proust wrote was a rehearsal for the Search, but the important point—made clear by his many anguished doubts about whether or not he was a novelist—is that until he found the…

Pass It on

In English, I send my articles out via e-mail. It’s one of the best ways, and certainly the easiest, to publish political writing in this country. Send it to your friends and let the friends,…

Writing and Reading Inter-Are/2

Johnson made such chains of learned reference in his writing, and his written works are the outgrowth of the kind of reading Johnson did, in which fragments of writing can be distributed under preexisting topics…