When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!
Judy BlumeRead
Nobody ever asks me why my characters don't text each other. Besides, as soon as you put something 'electronic' in a book, it's already out of date by the time it's published: everything will have changed. Human emotion, on the other hand, will never change.
Interpretation
Human emotions are timeless, while technology quickly becomes outdated.
In this quote, Judy Blume emphasizes the enduring nature of human emotions compared to the rapidly changing landscape of technology. She suggests that while electronic forms of communication may be relevant for a moment, they ultimately become obsolete, whereas the feelings and connections that define human experience remain constant across time.
In practice
In a speech about the value of storytelling in an age of technology.
When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!
What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.
What can happen if a young reader picks up a book he/she isn't yet ready for? Questions, maybe. Usually, that child puts down the book and says, 'Boring.' Or, 'I'm not ready for this.' Kids are really good at knowing what they can handle.
Concentrate on how good if feels to be alive. No matter what. Just to see the color of the sky, just to smell the air, and feel the wind in your face
I wrote 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' right out of my own experiences and my own feelings when I was in sixth grade.
I loved to read, and I think any child who loves to read will read anything, including the back of the cereal box, which I did every morning.
One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.
He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.
Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.
Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
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