A Quote by Jonathan Safran Foer
When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.
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There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others.
I think first we have to begin by telling the truth, which I think has actually been a big stumbling block. We can look at Donald Trump and see how he lies, but I think we also have to look at some of the lies we've told ourselves and the lies we've accepted and internalized ourselves.
If you just read Joseph Campbell, who has written amazing books on mythology and religion, they all do come together at some point. There are some of the greatest stories that there have ever been in the Bible. All you have to do is read the book of Maccabi, it's like a film script.
It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.
There have been times when I've written something and it goes out and it comes back in a letter from some kid as to what they think about it and I've taken their analysis to heart so much that I have taken up his thing. Writing what my audience is telling me to write.
I hate it when something I've had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I've written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.
I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself.
I've learned to suck in my stomach when photographers are around. I used to read gossip magazines all the time, but I stopped when I started being written about in them and read incredible lies about myself.
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
There's an expression, "God is in the details," and it applies to nothing more than it does to the writing of fiction. To that and to the art of telling good lies. And what is fiction but the telling of lies?
You have to fire yourself as the writer when you direct something you've written. You have to fire yourself, or else you get precious about what you've written. You've got to open up and let the actors in, and re-conceive a lot of things.
Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway! ... You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.
The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.
You're writing for some version of yourself. You're writing the kinds of things that you like to read or wanted to read at a certain point. So, primarily for most of my career, I've written the kind of criticism that fascinates me. The things I discovered the things that get me going, that I'm excited about.
Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.
Often you read something about yourself, and either you've been ironic, and that doesn't work in print, or it paraphrases something that you said, and has a different meaning.
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