“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”
Category Archives: Quotes
The Book That Destroys Itself
Edmond Jabès, “Interview with Edmond Jabès”, Montemora #6 (1979) [reprinted in Susan Handelman’s The Sin of the Book]
Mallarmé wanted to put all knowledge into a book…. But in my opinion this book would be very ephemeral, since knowledge in itself is ephemeral. The book that would have a chance to survive, I think, is the book that destroys itself, that destroys itself in favour of another book that will prolong it. [via]
All Pages Aflame
“For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.”
– Bruno Schulz, The Book of Letters [via]
[See Clarice Lispector.]
Exfoliating an Idea
“I am not constructing a story, but exfoliating an idea that’s usually caught in a metaphor. I listen for its squeak. What I have written must tell me what to write next. If it does not, it must be rewritten until it does. That way I rewrite my beginning until the book is done.”
– William Gass, “William H. Gass: How I Write,” by Noah Charney , The Daily Beast 13 May 2013
Quotes
“I can’t think of anything to write, I’m just walking around here between the lines, underneath the light of your eyes, in the breath of your mouth…”
– Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
Quotes
“I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.”
– William Gass, “The Art of Fiction 65,” interview by Thomas LeClair, The Paris Review 70 Summer 1977
Quotes
“By the mouth for the ear: that’s the way I’d like to write.”
– William Gass, “The Art of Fiction 65,” interview by Thomas LeClair, The Paris Review 70 Summer 1977
Quotes
“What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says — but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.”
– Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
Quotes
“I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. Different experiences in our lives may enforce or ameliorate that, but I think if they ameliorate it totally, we stop writing. You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.”
– Andrea Barrett, “The Art of Fiction 180,” interview by Elizabeth Gaffney, The Paris Review 168 Winter 2003
Quotes
“Gary [Lutz] was the first writing teacher I had who showed me that the sentence was capable of art. He would underline good sentences and interrogate bad ones. Verbs would be circled and Gary would ask ‘inevitable?’ And no, the verb was not inevitable, and I’d never considered that concept before, inevitability. It smacks of the eternal, a text beyond the writer to which the writer submits.”
– Dylan Nice, “An Interview with Dylan Nice,” interview by Rachel Yoder, Bookslut March 2013
[See Vladimir Nabokov and William Gaddis.]
ANDREW GALLIX 