A Quote by Raymond Carver
There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.
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I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.
One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.
People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.
South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.
I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.
Everyone ought to wish to marry; some ought to be allowed to marry; and others ought to marry twice - to make the average good.
There is too great a tendency (perhaps encouraged by popular journalism) to deal with the dramatic moments, forgetting that these are not always the most significant moments. ... To find the significant rather than the dramatic features of industrial controversy, of a disagreement in regard to policy on board of directors or between managers, is essential to integrative business policies.
Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.
I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.
Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.
It's not about the big deal you struck that day, it's not about the new car, it's not about the obvious stuff. It's about that little introspective moment you had in the middle of all that. Those are moments between the moments, and that's where life is.
I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can't do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it.
In the same period, Polish literature also underwent some significant changes. From social-political literature, which had a great tradition and strong motivation to be that way, Polish literature changed its focus to a psychological rather than a social one.
Everyone finds their little ways of getting past bad moments and everyone has them, it's football. We get the good moments and we get stick. You can start overthinking, it's human, everyone does it.
There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.
Literature has low enough standards. But we can avoid writing the worst literature if we make ourselves ask ourselves, every two or three sentences we write, 'Is that what I really think?'
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