“I’m not a social person. Not that I’m not at ease. I’m pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It’s not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that’s all.”
(Image via Flavorwire.)
Posted in books, inspiration, quotes
“I’m only the messenger!”
“Now you’re the message,” Parker told him, and shot him.
—Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake), Butcher’s Moon
(Via @sarahw.)
“If it were true that wide and deep reading redounds wholly positively on the development of a wholesome self, consider a typical member of a university English department, and despair.”
—Rick Gekoski, “Reading Is Overrated”
(Via Alan Jacobs.)
“For me it tends to be more a matter of finding the links between things. I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the ’20s and ’30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I’m always on the lookout for memoirs – frequently by the less-than-famous – that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas. I like books published before 1940 that are illustrated with photographs; even if those are frequently small and murky, they are rare windows into the past. Books help me construct whole worlds in my mind, and I require an army of books to complete the picture, not that it’s ever truly complete. When I’m truly passionate about a subject, anything can be grist for the mill. Poetry can be as materially informative as journalism, and railroad timetables can be as evocative and lilting as poems. I derive nourishment from the copyright pages, from the publishers’ ads in the back, from even the most misguided attempts at cover design.”
Posted in books
“In design-speak, ‘a library’ means a room lined with books, floor-to ceiling, but it all depends on the space you have. You may have a free-standing bookshelf of your favorite books if that’s all you have room for. A house is really empty without books though, and living with books is particularly important for the bachelor. Books allow somebody to understand what your interests are.”
When the day comes that people no longer read books, it’s good to know that we can painstakingly stack them into desks and place our computers atop them.
(Via.)
“I draft prose on-screen, work it over until I can’t find much wrong with it, then double-space it and print it out. At that point I discover what’s really there, which is ordinarily hazy, bloated, and boring. It looked pretty good on-screen, but it’s crap. My first drafts on paper, after what amount to several drafts on computer, look like a battlefield.”
To me, a printed Wired mag feels more “advanced” than its iPad equivalent. Bigger, flexible, cheaper, shareable. Long live analog.
Todd Dominey
tdominey
Related post: “Books vs. E-Books.”
Posted in books, reading, technology
“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.”
(Via.)
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