[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…
Recently my friend Lindsay Wolff inquired if I was doing a writing class this fall. Giving it some thought, I decided to offer the following just because I thought it could be (1) a fun …
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…
[T]oday it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.—Simone Weil, Waiting for God For [Dorothy] Day,…
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,…
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…
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. –Joan Didion, The White Album
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. –Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching towards Bethlehem Sao Paulo,…
“You have to write your own history, nobody’s going to do it for you.” –Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Anne Waldman, Beats at Naropa
When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library…