A Quote by Michael Dirda
Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
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I only saw fire and chandeliers and smoke. No people. Not the room. Not even a time frame. Do you know how many chandeliers there are in the south wing alone? What was I supposed to do? Tell everyone to avoid chandeliers forever?
A lot of hotels have beautiful chandeliers because the asset owner is emotional about having chandeliers in the property. I always say that the customers aren't going to have chandeliers for breakfast. You'd rather take that money and give great breakfasts to the customer.
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
My house is filled with books, most of which I have read, some of which I intend to eventually get to. I'm always reading at least one work of fiction and one work of non-fiction simultaneously. Whatever mood I'm in, there's always a book nearby to suit it.
Literature is a house with many mansions.
Swing your swing. Not some idea of a swing. Not a swing you saw on TV. Not that swing you wish you had. No, swing your swing. Capable of greatness. Prized only by you. Perfect in it's imperfection. Swing your swing. I know, I did.
The Democratic Party is a house of many mansions. It is a body which is extremely important in representing all kinds of people in all parts of the country who have very broad and very different views.
One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
The novels are always morphing into something else now, some kind of hybrid, more of a ground that isn't so easily specified. I suppose you could call it creative non-fiction, and rather focused on the natural world, which is what I'm most interested in reading these days. At least that would be the closest thing, but my books also include some fiction, so they're difficult to pinpoint.
I swing with a lot of torque from non-fiction to fiction, and I really like that place in between.
Business is many things, the least of which is the balance sheet. It is a fluid, ever changing, living thing, sometimes building to great peaks, sometimes falling to crumbled lumps.
Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.
The Saviour said He was going to prepare us a place. How wonderful it will be is beyond human computation. Remember that in six days Christ made the heavens and earth and all that in them is.... If He made so many wonders in six days, then what beauties and marvels He has surely prepared during these 1900 years in which He has been preparing our mansions in the Father's House!
I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.
But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world.
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