Reading
I am not ready to starve my dislike so that an enemy, or someone whom I perceive as enemy, or someone who merely irritates me, can eat buttery joy. I am selfish.
Mehta in Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, merges the history of his own development as a writer with a biography of Shawn. Anyone interested in how a writer works will find Mehta’s book usefully instructive.
As much research as I did in Amsterdam, and as much help as I had with the police business and the prostitute business and the city, I can truthfully say that the shoe idea was mine.
Reichl’s mother suffered from manic-depressive illness and veered between hilarity and near catatonia. She also not infrequently made up meals for family and guests from food that was just plain spoiled.
Ms. McDermott writes in Child of My Heart a horrible, grisly, bloody scene with a cat. The scene was so well-wrought in all its bloodiness and horror that I found myself looking away from the page.
I asked Mrs. Barr how it had felt, to read the letters her sister, from the time they were both young, had written to her. Some of the letters, I said, were condemnatory and even angry.
You tuck into your overstuffed chair, a book in your hand. Let’s make believe the book is Kerouac’s On the Road (published finally in 1957) and let’s make believe that, , you’ve never before read it.
Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this.
“The new editor at the New Yorker isn’t interested in writing, at all. At first I didn’t understand that she wasn’t interested in writing. That she was, you know, interested in giving a good party.”
“We have variously independently chosen a week of poems and worked collaboratively. All three of us read books and journals that we receive from publishers. We try to put poems together that hang together….”
“Not long ago, after a reading, a woman asked me to sign her bare breast. I think that she was looking for a strange secular blessing that readers feel has singled out the writer.”
“We belonged to what was called the Rec Center in Tiburon. It eventually became the Tiburon Peninsula Club. But it was the club where the middle-class people that populated Tiburon when I was a child played.”
Merton and Milosz met face to face twice, once at Merton’s monastery and once over lunch in the Bay Area. “He said that Merton was very pleasant, very down-to-earth, somewhat surprisingly unstuffy for a monk.
Somebody once told us that if you like cats, you like all breeds of cats, but if you like a certain breed of dog, you don’t necessarily like other breeds of dogs.”
"There is practically a love relationship between me and Anna Swir. Though we were not lovers at all, but it is sort of by empathy I feel her body, so to say.”
"I had just moved to the house in Ithaca. I was driving back to the old rental. On the way over it occurred to me there wasn’t a yearly ‘best of’ book devoted to American poetry."