In 1934, Ezra Pound told James Laughlin that he was never going to make it as a poet and ought to do “something useful” instead. Laughlin took “do something useful” to mean “publish experimental literature,” so, in 1936, he founded New Directions, a publishing house dedicated to writers at the forefront of the literary expression of the day.
Quotes
Quote: Productivity and self-control
Very often when we talk about the skill of ‘productivity’ what we are really talking about is ‘self-control.’
James Shelley (via the 99%)
Read: 200 million Tweets per day
Every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world.
The Twitter Blog, 200 million Tweets per day. (via futurejournalismproject)
Quote: “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed…”
“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook” (via missmollymary)
it’s like whispering to your companion during a dinner party: you might not get heard loud and clear, but only a fool wouldn’t take note of the possibility of leakage.
Susan Orlean on sending private messages via social media (via newyorker)
I’m not sure about themes except something so large as the basic loneliness of man. That’s always there.
Shelby Foote (via theparisreview)
Write as much as you can!! Write, write, write until your fingers break!
Anton Chekhov (via libraryland)
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
T.S. Eliot, “Preludes” (via the-final-sentence)
I love metaphor the way some people love junk food.
William Gass (via theparisreview)
Though I was groomed in traditional, old-school journalism with a capital J, I realize that the world—and that includes journalism—is evolving and I have to adapt and evolve with it. In this digital age and with social media I think the fact that viewers can reach out and tell us things instantly is amazing for us, but we can’t allow those tools to make us paranoid about what we say or do. We walk a fine line between objectivity and being too vulnerable to the whims of the audience. We have to balance that by making sure we go back to old-school fact checking regardless of what’s trending. We have to give viewers the truth and tell them the news.
CNN’s Don Lemon lays out his media diet. Read the rest of the interview at The Atlantic Wire. (via theatlantic)
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
Soren Kierkegaard (via 500daysofkissingmypillow)
Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.
Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (via libraryland)
The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.
Richard Powers (via theparisreview)
I think the names of colors are at the edge between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful.
A. S. Byatt (via theparisreview)
It is a luxury to be understood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (via fever-inmymind)
The smell of ink is intoxicating to me – others may have wine, but I have poetry.
Terri Guillemets (via scribbledpoetry)
I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
Joyce Carol Oates, I Am No One You Know: Stories (via libraryland)
…the idea of going to your desk for existential comfort, or at least some sort of a reason to get up every day, and also a reason for why it’s okay to get up every day or even desirable to get up every day—that idea makes sense to me. And if you could actually communicate that sense to your reader—if your book convinced them somehow, even temporarily, that it’s perhaps overwhelmingly okay to get up every day—that would be, to say the least, pretty neat.
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’
C.S. Lewis (via libraryland)
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
T. S. Eliot. Quoted in “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (via ahistoryofquotes)
I’m glad that sales of my books have dropped to where serious literary journals now take an interest in me.
I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It’s something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn’t seem to have any literary merit at all. It’s a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.
Paul Theroux discusses blogging, travel writing, “Three Cups of Tea,” and his new book “The Tao of Travel.” Read the whole interview at The Atlantic. (via theatlantic)
If you work with your hands, you’re a laborer.
If you work with your hands and your mind, you’re a craftsman.
If you work with your hands and your mind and your heart, you’re an artist.
Saint Francis of Assisi (via ftweeks)
The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
Edith Sitwell (via nathanielstuart)
Coffeehouse Junkie 