A Quote by Darryl Pinckney

Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'

Darryl Pinckney

Quote Topics

Blurred David Distant Distinctions Expectations Give John Life Low Novels Often Pictures Places Recent Say Set Those Tokyo Trade Travel Travel Writing Unlike Us Ward Water Way Writing

Quote Author

Darryl Pinckney
American - Novelist
Born: 1953

Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes . . . all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating.

Phil Cousineau

Unlike many travel books I didn't set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.

Chesa Boudin

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory.

Chris Ware

Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.

Floyd Skloot

Here in this ocean, in the midst of all this water, with the red flags on those distant buoys flapping in the sea breeze, I find myself unable to treat our house in Tokyo as anything but a dream.

Banana Yoshimoto

Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!)

Kate Christensen

Divorce, and broken marriages, are all around us, but they're not frequently depicted on screen, or if they are, they're often depicted in ways that have very little to do with reality.

Katie Hafner

Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

Jane Smiley

I like to keep my expectations low and my aspirations high in my career and my life. That way I'm pleasantly surprised more often than desperately disappointed.

Jason O'Mara

I don't really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero is a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the life of a story who start out with certain low expectations and then over achieve our highest expectations for them. That's the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a filmmaker.

Steven Spielberg

Interviewing Rei Kawakubo in Tokyo and John Galliano in Paris, both for 'Pop' magazine, were huge for me, not just in learning about fashion and writing but about how little desire I had to be a critic/reporter/journalist/commentator so much as a kind of travel diarist.

Tavi Gevinson

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

Raymond Carver

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

John Irving

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

So far are we generally from thinking what we often say of the shortness of life, that at the time when it is necessarily shortest we form projects which we delay to execute, indulge such expectations as nothing but along train of events can gratify, and suffer those passions to gain upon us which are only excusable in the prime of life.