Yashvardhan Jain

Perhaps this is an obvious one, but please do not check your email or the news or your texts or your social media or anything like that right when you wake up. (Get a real clock; don’t sleep in the same room as your phone.)

I’m not one of those people who think you have to write from some sacred, semi-subconscious state of mind that’s closest to yo... See more

When there’s too much to care about, what’s a good-hearted person to do?

Stephen Sondheim replied right away. He offered love and sympathy — “and tea, if you want it.” His protégé’s predicament seemed totally understandable. “I don’t know why this hasn’t paralyzed you already,” he emailed back. “I’m sure it’s already occurred to you, but the simplest way is the best. Isolate yourself from everything but family and work.... See more

Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you di... See more

Joyce was in the habit of reading some of his own fiction to his pupils. After one of their lessons, Schmitz admitted that he, too, had been a writer once. Curious, Joyce asked to read his work, and Schmitz lent him his two novels. At their next lesson, Joyce arrived with an urgent question: “Do you know that you are a neglected writer?”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

It is only when we dare to leave a place, a city, a memory that we realise in earnest what “home” really means, but if this is true, home is always bound to remain unattainable, unreturnable—motherland is a huge castle built on dunes, and when it collapses with the wind, it flows between our fingers like dry sand.

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

If a writer ever achieved that perfect book, Faulkner said, there would be nothing left for him but suicide.