alec burns

is that all you need to do to be a writer is to write sincerely about yourself and all you see. to run around naked, stripped of all that is pretty and polished and put on display your heart for us passersby to examine. all you need is a pen, and yourself.

as a writer, even as a child, long before what i wrote began to be published i developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs - joan didion

I realized this year that what stays with me from books is never plot, always voice. Voice as ongoing observations of the living world and the relationships that bind us together within it. Voice as autonomy. For a long time I didn’t really know how to write in my own “voice.” I had to learn I could just say the thing I felt

But everything that may someday be possible for many people, the solitary man can now, already, prepare and build with his own hands, which make fewer mistakes. Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is... See more

Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most... See more