The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “writing”

Tom Gauld’s Brilliant Literary Cartoons Blur the Artificial Line Between “High” and “Pop” Culture
Tom Gauld’s Brilliant Literary Cartoons Blur the Artificial Line Between “High” and “Pop” Culture

From Hemingway’s hangovers to the messiness of creative collaborations, wryly witty visual satire of intellectualism.

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Annie Dillard on the Art of the Essay and the Different Responsibilities of Narrative Nonfiction, Poetry, and Short Stories
Annie Dillard on the Art of the Essay and the Different Responsibilities of Narrative Nonfiction, Poetry, and Short Stories

“Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.”

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Schopenhauer on Style
Schopenhauer on Style

“Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.”

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The Six Motives of Creativity: Mary Gaitskill on Why Writers Write
The Six Motives of Creativity: Mary Gaitskill on Why Writers Write

The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response.

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Joan Didion on Storytelling, the Economy of Words, and Facing Rejection
Joan Didion on Storytelling, the Economy of Words, and Facing Rejection

“Short stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.”

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Donald Barthelme on the Art of Not-Knowing and the Essential Not-Knowing of Art
Donald Barthelme on the Art of Not-Knowing and the Essential Not-Knowing of Art

“Our devouring commercial culture… results in a double impoverishment: theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer.”

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Flannery O’Connor on Why the Grotesque Appeals to Us, Plus a Rare Recording of Her Reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Flannery O’Connor on Why the Grotesque Appeals to Us, Plus a Rare Recording of Her Reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.”

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The Distracted Public: Saul Bellow on How Writers and Artists Save Us from the “Moronic Inferno” of Our Time
The Distracted Public: Saul Bellow on How Writers and Artists Save Us from the “Moronic Inferno” of Our Time

“The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.”

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Vladimir Nabokov on Writing, Reading, and the Three Qualities a Great Storyteller Must Have
Vladimir Nabokov on Writing, Reading, and the Three Qualities a Great Storyteller Must Have

“Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.”

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The Project of Literature: Susan Sontag on Writing, Routines, Education, and Elitism in a 1992 Recording from the 92Y Archives
The Project of Literature: Susan Sontag on Writing, Routines, Education, and Elitism in a 1992 Recording from the 92Y Archives

“A writer is someone who pays attention to the world — a writer is a professional observer.”

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