I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.
- Harper Lee is often assumed to have suffered from prayers too fully answered. She made possibly the greatest literary debut of all time with To Kill a Mockingbird, winning the Pulitzer (galling to Capote) and selling more than 10 million copies. But in the 46 years since, she has produced only three magazine articles, all in the '60s ... Yet if success can paralyse, the lack of it can do the same ;-)
It should have been the highlight of his year. It's not everyday that your work is read by 110,000 people. On a summer-hot morning last year, before the sun could summon up the energy to burn and fry, the surreal barbarians entered the gate. Barbarian souls are never black or white; they're all gray in the end, Dadais. You're a gray soul for sure, just like the rest of us. Jozef Imrich's memoirs detail an escape so tragic that some critics have questioned, if, like his name, he made it up... It should have been the highlight of my life, but it is hard to know which to hope for! There is no true life when everything is prosperous. It is the essence of a rich life to be always uncertain of tomorrow... to run the gamut of monthly bills and yet to be determined never to give up the fight. I gather Lauren agrees with this notion too ... Does a richly surreal life require a messy battle with adversity?
(The central question in art is that of the ego. Franz Kafka attempted to answer this question in several ways. One way was to not finish what he started (none of his novels was ever completed). Another way was to not publish what he wrote (most of his writing he never attempted to publish). Finally, he tried to destroy what he had written (he asked, on his death bed, that his friend Max Brod burn all his papers, a request which Max Brod fortunately disobeyed). But none of these strategies was sufficient unto itself, which is why Kafka did finish and publish some stories, and gave Max Brod the impression that he was at least ambivalent about his request to have his papers burned after his death. So what was Kafka doing? Who am I like? You are like me! I’ve had these doubts before. They will pass, they will pass . . .)
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Rational derangement of all the senses
Sometimes you just find that something isn't there any longer that was there. It isn't sad. It's just right. This sentiment applies to relationships not just writing ..
There is, of course, something grandiose about this romantic idea of writing. The brutal truth is that it is an ill-regarded job, paying virtually nothing and requiring long solitary hours and isolation. Perhaps in order to keep going one must think of it as something more magnificent that one has no choice but to do. And perhaps this is why writers who choose to give up writing remain the most troubling.
• Life is unfair / Kill yourself or get over it! Great paradoxes of the condition that his inability to do so became a kind of proof of his genius [I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity - Justifiably paranoid? Alone together : Book Review: Carrying not coals to Newcastle, but hard-boiled, U.S.-style crime ; Ha! I'm caught up! Tanya is a girl who escapes her unpopularity by dreaming that she will become the muse of a great writer. Her favorite is Dostoyevski, and she chooses as her own inspiration his mistress, Polina, who was immortalized as a character in The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. Memoirs of a Muse: In the Bathtub of the World ]
• · People do awful things to each other. But it is worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything is light. That is all you can say, really. - Czech-born Tom Stoppard (as the new photographer Guthrie says at the end of Night and Day.) Nondisclosure Agreements, "Film Fuss" ; Some people say that I have it all-- I disagree. I constantly have to struggle with this love-hate relationship I have with writing. I love reading, that's for sure. And I love to write… about myself as and when I want to. But … Writing in Exchange for Bread on the Table
• · · Ever wondered why so many young adults are still living at home with their parents? Puzzled by the plummeting birthrate among the under-30s? Few takers for true adulthood ; Hanging in there Male Nudity ; The new naughty Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television
• · · · Translators of fiction are like priests who stand between us and the literary gods. We need them even as we pine for direct contact.... When he grew up he would work in a match factory Novels found in translation ; Some of literature's biggest names have been struck down, but writer's block is not always an angst-ridden affliction When an author's muse packs up and leaves
• · · · · “There is always, in every truth procedure, a poetic moment,” says Alain Badiou. “We can’t even know a truth event without a sense of poetry”. Math Matters: It was a sky of names. We lost the sky; I have a hard time seeing where the opening of the Kreutzer "comes from." There are no easy sources for its particular beauty. The sort of question I feel it asks is Why Do I Exist? or How Did I Come Into Being? And that is what gives it, for me, a kind of surreal beauty: an oddly certain question, a fragment that is strangely and prematurely complete. The piece is mature beyond its measures.... I Have A Question: is Beethoven setting up a dualism of light/dark?
• · · · · · THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD: I like to think of it as mythological, but, of course, one person’s myth is another person’s cliché Literature: At home in Dublin’s criminal underworld ; Melissa Plaut's NEW YORK HACK, about the author's years driving a New York City yellow medallion cab, "a career change she made after having decided at the age of twenty-nine to become "the driver of my own life More assholes, more hookers
