Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The Cockroach
the speculative novelist becomes a satirist; he looks around, and he makes it worse.
Martin Amis • The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)
“William Sorley.”
Deborah Harkness • The Black Bird Oracle
For all its surrealist elements, Midnight’s Children is a history novel, looking for an answer to the great question history asks us: What is the relationship between society and the individual, between the macrocosm and the microcosm? To put it another way: Do we make history or does it make (or unmake) us?
Salman Rushdie • Midnight's Children: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)
I turn into a theorising black crow.
Haruki Murakami • Kafka on the Shore
Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel, because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, as his fellow citizens suffered from a poison that began in the individual spirit and then made its way into politics
Colm Tóibín • The Private Life: On James Baldwin - The Paris Review
“Their stated object was a crusade against the infidel,” wrote Sa’id Mubarak Shah, “their real one was plunder.
William Dalrymple • The Last Mughal
Not that it made him look especially happy – he was more like an old sorcerer chuckling to himself over an ominous prophecy he was about to reveal.