Zitat des Tages von Ben Dolnick:
Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.
I know very well that to admit to loving Bright Eyes is to admit to having an overgrown brain region devoted to self-pity, sentimentality, regret, and a handful of other not very appealing emotional states.
I will never, most likely, be good at the piano, but thanks to it, I will never forget the humbling, infuriating, necessary slowness of progress in any artistic endeavor.
For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in the same way as novels.
Upon reading the deeply serious opening of Scott Spencer's 'Endless Love', you will very likely laugh out loud. The tone is something like what you might find in a teenager's diary: verbose, feverish, furiously self-important.
A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.
Oberst is one of those musicians that some people hate in a visceral, biological way.
Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.
One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline.
The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.
