Conversations are the most direct way to connect with people.
From Padgett Powell
Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
When I write, I want something to sound good itself.
I don't write anything if I'm not agreeable and liking it. I'm not one of these slavers who wads up paper. It comes or it doesn't.
I was always the new kid, and I got to know the language and the politics of being on the outside, looking in. Never being in the clique - always being a student of the clique, a subversive, and I could look around and identify the other guys who were excluded.
If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.
It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.
I've had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one's potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.
In my experience, great reviews almost always ensure no sales.
I think William Trevor is as good as it gets. Whenever I want a book to do exactly what it says it will, I read him.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives