“Good books are stunning charges of vital energy” —Elena Ferrante
“A reader’s favorite subject is the reader.”
Derek Thompson • Hit Makers
The redemption arc, in clumsy hands, becomes cheesy and unbelievable, offending good taste more often than not. Granted. But literature has, in the past, found ways to handle this sort of plot delicately, and to great effect. After all, the question of how a person changes ought to absolutely possess a novelist – as a matter of philosophical inquir... See more
The Lost Redemption Arc
That is, writing about our own joys and wounds and sense of the world means writing in every way, always, knowing that we are the product, good or bad, of encounters and clashes, sought out and accidental, with the stuff of others.
Elena Ferrante • In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
So, in so much contemporary fiction, the most revealing and accurate descriptions of our daily life are shot through with strangeness, or displaced in time, or set on imaginary worlds, or dissolved into the phantasmagoria of drugs or of psychosis, or rise from the mundane suddenly into the visionary and then come out the other side.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books
Many of us now alive are in the unique position of having been so both before and after the revolution of the internet. We’re a lost group — to me, anyway, even now none of my technological habits seem inevitable. There’s still a sense that this vast binge of novelty will stop and we’ll arrive at some levelheaded equilibrium between then and now. T... See more
Catherine Emil added
While finishing the book, I wrote to a novelist friend and asked him whether I sounded naïve in my approach. Of course you do, he said, and that’s the only way to write anything in a dying world. In fact, to write any book is an act of practically fanatic devotion, he said, because to write a book is to insist on the possibility of a future in whic... See more
Elvia Wilk • Fandom as Methodology: On Fan-Nonfiction and Finding the Joy of Mutual Delusion
Sixian added
For a woman who has something to say, does it really take a miracle—I said to myself—to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and show herself in her own words to the world?