The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “writing”

10 Tips on Writing from Joyce Carol Oates
10 Tips on Writing from Joyce Carol Oates

“Don’t try to anticipate an ideal reader — or any reader. He/she might exist — but is reading someone else.”

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Thoreau on Why Not to Quote Thoreau
Thoreau on Why Not to Quote Thoreau

“It would be a truer discipline for the writer to … clear a new field instead of manuring the old.”

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How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity
How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity

“The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.”

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Good Writing vs. Talented Writing
Good Writing vs. Talented Writing

“Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.”

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Cats, Guns, and Books: William S. Burroughs’s Daily Routine
Cats, Guns, and Books: William S. Burroughs’s Daily Routine

For breakfast, “a salted soft-boiled egg with toast, or perhaps fresh-squeezed lemonade, and two cups of very sweet tea.”

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Gay Talese’s Daily Routine, Plus a Money-Saving Tip from the Godfather of Literary Journalism
Gay Talese’s Daily Routine, Plus a Money-Saving Tip from the Godfather of Literary Journalism

“At 8:00 p.m. I am contemplating the numbing predinner delight of a dry gin martini.”

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Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters
Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters

“One writes most of all in order to take part in a collective enterprise.”

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The Quartet of Creativity: 28-Year-Old Susan Sontag on the Four People a Great Writer Must Be
The Quartet of Creativity: 28-Year-Old Susan Sontag on the Four People a Great Writer Must Be

“A great writer has all 4 — but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.”

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Raymond Chandler on Writing: A Lifetime of Wisdom on the Craft from His Private Letters
Raymond Chandler on Writing: A Lifetime of Wisdom on the Craft from His Private Letters

“Writers … have to fight the impulse to live up to someone else’s idea of what they are.”

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Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers
Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers

Hemingway, Didion, Baldwin, Fitzgerald, Sontag, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Morrison, Orwell, Le Guin, Woolf, and other titans of literature.

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