some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
Jennifer EganRead
It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have no choice but to read our work. Now that's a very tall order, if not impossible. But why not try?
Interpretation
Fiction writers aim to create an extraordinary experience that compels readers to engage with their work.
This quote emphasizes the unique responsibility of fiction writers to craft stories that offer unparalleled enjoyment and fulfillment to readers. Egan acknowledges the challenge inherent in this pursuit, suggesting that while it may seem impossible to achieve such a profound impact, the effort to do so is worthy and essential in the realm of literature.
In practice
In a writer's workshop to inspire fellow authors.
some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.
I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
I write what I don't know. It's way more interesting.
You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
Dishonesty in trailers is more than a moral issue, it's a practical one. If you don't deliver in the film what you offered in the trailer, you'll get bad word-of-mouth.
I grew as an actor just by watching Kamal Haasan acting. I had the good fortune of being able to observe Kamal Haasan from close quarters.
What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.
And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.