"My head is full of fire
and grief and my tongue
runs wild, pierced
with shards of glass."

Federico Garcia Lorca, Blood Wedding (via ontheedgeofdarkness)

(Source: bonewhiteglory)

"Editor’s Query: Your narrator comes from the lower middle class, and contrives to join a group—a closed, secret society—comprised of students from the wealthy upper class. Why make him the narrator? Is he the one, actually, most likely to betray the others?
Donna Tartt: It’s the narrator’s business to betray, whether he’s aware of it or if he wants it to be or not. That’s his function in any novel."

Donna Tartt, by Jill Eisenstadt (via overturetoalabasterskin)

(Source: bombsite.com)

"… the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light …"

Mark Strand, from “The End” (via growing-orbits)

"Flame burns, rain sinks into the cracks
And they all go to rack ruin beneath the thud of the years."

Ezra Pound, from “Homage to Sextus Propertius, I” (via bookoflead)

"Over the years I’ve learned to guard my privacy, not because so many people have tried to invade it (some have), but because writing demands that one be protective and adamant about so much that a certain a priori unwillingness to oblige spills over even to situations where it isn’t necessary."

Nicole Krauss (Great House)

(Source: iamyourlung)

"Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists."

Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own. Taken from Ruth Franklin’s revealing article in The New Republic, on why women’s literature is still treated differently & considered “less than” in many ways. Written in 1929; could’ve been written yesterday. (via mytacist)

(Source: tnr.com)

"I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it’s going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur.” She cackles with laughter."

Donna Tartt (via flourhoneyandmilk)

(Source: Guardian)

"So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day."

Zora Neale Hurston (via slychedelic)

(Source: entropy-entropy)

"During the monsoon, on my last morning, all this Beethoven and rain."

Michael Ondaatje, from Running in the Family (thanks, an-ice-cream-memory)

(Source: the-final-sentence)

"Imagination, of course, can open any door- turn the key and let the terror walk right in."

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (via lifewhatisitbutadream)

"‘Larvatus prodeo’—‘I show myself wearing a mask,’ was Descartes’ motto, and it captures in a nutshell every writer’s constitutive two-facedness."

Durs Grunbein, The Vocation of Poetry (via notquitelocal)

(Source: invisiblestories)

amandaonwriting:

Zadie Smith - On Writing

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

"Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit."

Andre Dubus (via ilovereadingandwriting)

(Source: advicetowriters.com)

"Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different."

Cormac McCarthy (via wichmanart)