A Quote by Kaye Gibbons
I read about writers' lives with the fascination of one slowing down to get a good look at an automobile accident.
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I suppose I try to look for those things where the world turns on you. It's every automobile accident, every accident at a party, you're having a good time until suddenly you're not.
Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things come to light you never could have predicted.
As you get older, you start to read the game more, and as your brain starts working more, and as you get a good footballing brain, your legs start slowing down!
Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.
There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books. I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.
I like to think that good people win. But even good people have other sides. Most people will slow down to get a good look at an accident, even though they won't admit it.
Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.
Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
The writers job is to get naked, To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury!
I never understood the idea that you're supposed to mellow as you get older. Slowing down isn't something I relate to at all. The goal is to continue in good and bad, all of it.
It's always good to get good reviews. I read my reviews. There are a lot of writers who don't read their reviews at all. I read them; then I put them away because it's not good to engage with them too much.
I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down.
I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.
..few writers like other writers' works. The only time they like them is when they are dead or if they have been for a long time. Writers only like to sniff their own turds. I am one of those. I don't even like to talk to writers, look at them or worse, listen to them. And the worst is to drink with them, they slobber all over themselves, really look piteous, look like they are searching for the wing of the mother. I'd rather think about death than about other writers. Far more pleasant.
I try not to read about myself. Why would reading about yourself be interesting? You're only going to be told you're doing a good job and get big headed about it, or be told you're rubbish and get down in the dumps. What's the point?
People are put down in television now, not because they're not qualitative, not because they're not talented - but because there's no room for them, and worse than that, there's nowhere they can find exposure. Their own good talent may die of mourning, just for want of having somebody read what they've written. I don't presume to say how we can best provide platforms for new writers to get read. I don't know. But therein lies the major problem.
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