Here's hoping...

The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that in the end all writers get pretty much what’s coming to them: the destructive praise and flattery, the killing attention and appreciation.

(New Yorker)

From the horse's face

"It’s a funny thing about life that, when you put it in a novel, it’s dead."

- Martin Amis, in Prospect

Boswell vs Johnson - LIVE!

ASH: Diary idea a cracker. My biographer (i.e. I) will be so gutted when I reach 70 and have never got round to it.

Dom: You'll have to busy yourself editing mine... X

ASH: You are a total Johnson x

Incoming!

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Pour mon camarade

How did they command such deference - English teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They'd stitch it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion, and even, on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.

- Tobias Wolff, Old School

Meanwhile, in the Times Education Supplement....

"The pressure is on the author to deliver as enriching an experience as video games do."

- Jeff Kinney

Novel UPDATE

Hauteur! Hauteur!

I find my name listed in the program of the Edinburgh International Festival among those of writers invited to take part in its Writers Conference.... Needless to say that I am supremely indifferent to "the problems of a writer and the future of the novel" that are to be discussed...

- Vladimir Nabokov, letter to The Times, May 30, 1962

A precursory glance

Every writer creates his own precursors.

- Borges, 'Kafka and His Precursors'

Gawd...

It is impossible for a man to read and earn money at the same time, unless he is a reviewer, and Ruggiero prayed never to fall so low.

- Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies

[Personally, I gotta say I've never found it possible to read and earn money even while being a reviewer. But there it is.]

I have a question

If a man who tells stories about his own adventures is branded an egotist and a bore, why is the man who spins fictions neither sectioned as a madman nor denounced as a liar?

On fiction

The only problem with 'make believe' is that it so rarely does.

Priorities

"I write for two reasons: partly to make money and partly to win the respect of people whom I respect."

- EM Forster, interviewed by the BBC on his 80th birthday

Coetzee on Emants on Turgenev

In 1880 [Marcellus] Emants published an essay on Turgenev which describes his own philosophy rather better than it does Turgenev's.

- JM Coetzee, Stranger Shores: essays 1986-1999

Ain't that always the way?

Thought for the day

"On a good day, writing about my life is the most sublime, cathartic, godly, and honest thing I could ever imagine doing ... On a bad day, however, it’s narcissistic and unimaginative. My pathetic life plays back like some annoying Top 40s jingle that lodges in the head and won’t leave."

- Jamie Brisick, in the latest issue of Five Dials.

For our American readers

Irony has to contain an element of suffering in it, (Otherwise it is the attitude of a know-it-all.)

- Robert Musil, Diaries

Criteria for entry into the writing 'profession'

Sick
highly complex
neurasthenic
in some respects of unsound mind
in other respects perverse...

-Marcellus Emants, A Posthumous Confession

On essay-writing*

There is something undeniably boring about ordering thoughts long familiar to reasonably clever people for the sake of some external purpose.

- Robert Musil, 'The Obscene and Pathological in Art' (1911), Precision and Soul

--
* Equally, 'On journalism'...

True dat(a)

"In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it."

- John Archibald Wheeler

At the (international) school gate

"As a writer you are considered one up from the dole."

- Robert Twigger

[NB He meant 'as a successful writer', obviously.]