“There’s a difference between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is when you feel an alignment with a particular character. Empathy is when you see things from that character’s point of view. Larry Cook [the Lear-like father in A Thousand Acres] is someone I don’t have any sympathy for, but I needed to have empathy in order …
“writing a book is still bloody hard work. I usually start by letting an idea percolate and take shape in my brain, which looks a lot like re-watching things on Netflix and shopping for stationery. Then I superfluously color-code an Excel spreadsheet and use it to plot out the major twists, turns and reveals. Then …
“. . . telling stories and writing fiction is a way of managing and exploring my own impulses and emotions. I’m not at the mercy of my terrors, my shame. I push the dredged-up emotions into shapes that are enjoyable in the end, even if their content seems violent or disturbing.” — novelist and poet …
“fiction is not only one of the great escapes from the “real world” but also one of the great reflections of it. A good novel can contextualize a moment in history and bring us to understand or accept it with more clarity. Reading can even be a humbling experience, allowing us to discover new perspectives …
“Humans love linear time because it’s comforting. But if you push linear time to the side over there (and give it a graham cracker, so it’s okay) then I was fascinated by the idea that epics might be in dialogue with each other rather than that old tired out notion that history is the past …
10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them) Gizmodo Australia: We asked some of our favourite writers, and they told us the 10 classic books that everyone pretends to have read, and why you should actually read them. From Asimov to Pynchon, science fiction contains some fantastic, ambitious works …
Irene was eighty years old, but she didn’t feel eighty. Not just because she was, sprained ankle notwithstanding, a spritely, trim woman, but because it was impossible to feel eighty. Nobody felt eighty. When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five. Forty, maybe. That was a good age to feel, …
“we read because it’s exciting. Metaphorically speaking, books are always taking us to the big city, opening our eyes to the world’s plenitude and diversity. By contrast, those who ban or censor them want to keep us down on the farm, restricting our experience to some safe or approved orthodoxy.” — Michael Dirda
“Choosing to put on a new identity as easily as one might put on a new hat can be a coping mechanism, the start of an elaborate con, the last resort of a victim fleeing an abuser, the refuge of a fantasist who can no longer face reality. Strategy or stratagem, adopting a new name, …
“First of all, writing is a way to find community with others, to discover whether you share judgment with them. Secondly, literary-critical debates are efforts to express what someone in a culture sees as urgent and important. Interpretation (or what I understand as simply “reading”) is where a culture comes to consciousness of itself. . …
