it is dochs oars, sûnt 2001

Quote of the Day | 0701

Writing describes a range of activities, like farming. Plowing virgin fields—writing new scenes—demands freshness, but there’s also polishing to be done, fact-checking, character-autobiography writing, realigning the text after you’ve made a late decision that affects earlier passages—that kind of work ...

[telt 89 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0704

Comics, as it happens, look magnificent on tablets. But no one in the comics industry is really ready for what that magnificence implies. Sales of periodical comics are falling, and there’s no iTunes Store equivalent to sell them digitally—no single ...

[telt 80 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0704

I became a bit less of a book-collector (or, perhaps, book-fetishist) after I published my first novel. Perhaps, at some subconscious level, I decided that since I was now producing my own first editions, I needed other people's less. I ...

[telt 106 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0704

The first edition of Montaigne’s Essais was published in 1580, at only about a third of its eventual length. He had cobbled it together over the preceding decade. Its audience, argues Desan, was really just one man: King Henry III. ...

[telt 63 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0705

The practice of fiction is no longer a vocation. It has become a profession, and professions are not characterized by creative mischief. Artistic vocations are about embracing more and more of the world with your will; professions are insular affairs ...

[telt 85 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0705

Behind the laughter, James hankered after seriousness, plugging away like Sisyphus at poetry and critical essays, and later some fiction. "I still suffer from a blurred image", he says, "but I don't mind." (I suspect he does.) Defensively, he celebrates ...

[telt 77 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0706

we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred ...

[telt 126 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0707

Michael typed in the “U.S. Declaration of Independence” in upper case, because there was no lower case yet. He mentioned where the 5 K file was stored to the 100 users of the embryonic internet of the time, though without ...

[telt 70 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0711

With “popular highlights,” even when we manage to turn off Twitter and the television and sit down to read a good book, there will a chorus of readers turning the pages along with us, pointing out the good bits. Before ...

[telt 81 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0714

In books we find a revealed truth; on the screen we assemble our own truth from pieces. On networked screens everything is linked to everything else. The status of a new creation is determined not by the rating given ...

[telt 88 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0714

Global communication is taking over these major languages. I’m currently reading some Greek detective thrillers by Petros Markaris and it would be fairly easy to translate them into English because they are in a form that is familiar to us ...

[telt 119 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0716

Journalism is not given much respect. Journalists themselves, particularly in my generation, didn’t take their jobs very seriously. I take it very seriously. This is a craft. This is an art form. I’m writing stories, just like fiction writers, only ...

[telt 132 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0716

It has become increasingly clear to me over these last 10 years, in which I have written more regularly than before, that the more I write the worse I become. More self-absorbed, less sensitive to the needs of others, less ...

[telt 74 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0717

Watching that trend, I find my grief for the state of civilization comes with a guilty surge of relief. Sure, I would miss books — and so, by the way, would my children — but at least the death of ...

[telt 72 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0720

"Films won and books lost. That's the story of the 20th century – the story of where the stories went," Toby Litt observes. An emphasis on strong plot and the rejection of fiction's digressive powers seems to be the order ...

[telt 59 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0721

Novels are easier to read. People settle into them. You don't have to be quite so attentive. People are always asking me why more people don't read short stories, given the press of time we all experience now. It would seem ...

[telt 179 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0722

readers pay for their literacy with a slight reduction in their ability to perceive faces. 'Reading may involve unlearning an older skill'

[telt 23 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0723

Books are less valuable as signifiers, and people who you ought to be talking to, some of them don’t write books. Clay Shirky in a conversation with Andrew Keen

[telt 29 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0723

It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters—which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your ...

[telt 151 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0725

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot. Alan Bennett, 'Baffled at a Bookcase' Boeklog on Bennett

[telt 37 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0726

comics storytelling is entirely predicated upon the print technologies of the late 1930s. We have six panels of page on average because that was the optimum numbers of panels to put on a page in a periodical of something like ...

[telt 120 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0727

The one story you read may paint a wildly inaccurate picture, while with the depth of a book—even a biased one—at least gives you some sense of scope. David Mekelburg, 'The News Gets Me High'

[telt 34 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0728

things happen way too fast. I always bring up the example of Tolstoy writing about the War of 1812 in the 1860s. The horse was a horse and a carriage was a carriage. Tolstoy didn't have to worry about the ...

[telt 113 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0802

We love Adrian partly because he is a failure. How much have you failed? Did you fail school exams? I failed everything – including cycling proficiency. Sue Townsend, 'I hate it when people call me a national treasure' Boeklog on Sue Townsend

[telt 39 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0803

Books will, in short, suffer the fate that has already befallen letters sent by mail: preciousness.Mark Oppenheimer, 'Judging a Girl by Her Cover'

[telt 23 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0804

We often do not know what we like or why we like what we do. Our preferences are riddled with unconscious biases, easily swayed by contextual and social influences. There is less chance than we think that we will like ...

[telt 85 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0805

There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. The wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, ...

[telt 52 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0805

I'm sorry Bookslut is not joining in the near-unanimous praise of your book, which has obviously made you believe you are entitled to nothing but. However. I read your book, and I found it fundamentally dishonest. My reviewer stands by ...

[telt 50 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0807

Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses. When enlisted by charismatic leaders and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they've been the foundations for religions and political systems. When a storyteller has held an audience captive around ...

[telt 106 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0807

there is a great inexorable power in expectation—as social beings, we want to like things we’re supposed to like, and we’re uncomfortable standing at the platform, watching the bullet train of popular opinion shriek by. Human nature, of ...

[telt 86 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0808

Chandler and Rankin rightly dismiss the supposed dichotomy between crime fiction and “literary” fiction as a red herring. Despite the persistent assumption that some literary forms are inherently more formulaic than others, all writing relies on genre markers, and “genre” ...

[telt 84 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0810

The implications of our reading brain’s plasticity are neither simple nor transient. The connections between how and what we read and what is written are critically important to today’s society. In a milieu that continuously confronts us with a glut ...

[telt 92 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0812

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence. Saul Bellow

[telt 31 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0812

“We found the people who read the [whole] story changed a bit in their personality,” Oatley says. “What we found interesting was that they all changed in somewhat different ways.” Toronto scientists determine that fiction can change personalities

[telt 37 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0812

All those forms, artificial as they seem to us today, would have appeared as natural and as right to their practitioners as the standard novel does today. Artificial though that novel form is, with its simplifications and distortions, its artificial ...

[telt 124 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0813

“The internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history,” posited the SXSW publishers’ panel in 2009. But what kind of reading, what kind of writing? The internet is the largest group ...

[telt 107 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0816

I've been writing for a living for around 15 years now and whatever method I practise remains a mystery. It's random. Some days I'll rapidly thump out an article in a steady daze, scarcely aware of my own breath. ...

[telt 108 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0817

I read for the pleasure of the sentence structure, or the use of language, or the control of metaphor, or for a sense of humor. Or the civilizing voice that is not particularly surprised or shocked by the world's wickedness. ...

[telt 84 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0818

for me, as a reader, the more dangerous problem with unsuccessful stories is usually much less complex: I am bored. And I would remain bored even if the story were packed with pages of detail aimed at establishing verisimilitude. I ...

[telt 101 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0820

we also feel, do we not, that originality is at least a symptom of creative worth. Larkin certainly felt so. In a letter of 1974 he quotes a remark by Clive James – “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, ...

[telt 56 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0821

I have read the arguments from publishers—the ones that say that we eBook readers are cheap and don’t understand the value of books, independent of the costs involved with printing, transporting, storing, and keeping them on shelves waiting to be ...

[telt 139 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0823

I’m already on record as believing that ebook distribution and retail should be based on a modular ecosystem, open file formats and standardised services. I should be able to buy a book from any retailer, have it automatically download to ...

[telt 88 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0824

De Botton, who classes himself as a writer rather than a philosopher, concurs. "For the past 150 years, to be a philosopher meant to be employed by a university, and with that came a certain approach to footnoting, teaching the ...

[telt 88 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0825

I have never read or heard about anything to do with the writing of fiction that fits, exactly, my own experience, and I now believe it must be difficult. If fiction grows out of the layers of time, memory, imagination ...

[telt 93 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0826

without reading, there can be no learning; without learning, there can be no sense of a larger world; without the sense of a larger world, there can be no ardor to find it; without ardor, where is joy? Helen Vendler, 'Reading ...

[telt 42 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0828

Imagine the silence if people said only what they know! Karel Capek, cited in:'Believe in People: the Essential Karel Capek' Boeklog on Capek

[telt 21 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0830

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For [Andrea] Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold ...

[telt 47 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0831

What we love about fiction writers is their willingness to dare this submergence, to give up, in behalf of brute reality, the voice of a wise and presentable man. The critic comes to us in a suit and tie. He ...

[telt 59 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0903

Harold Innis suggested that the history of culture itself was characterized by a balance between media that persisted in time -- think stone inscriptions and heavy parchment books -- and those offering the greatest portability across space, like paper, radio, ...

[telt 89 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0904

at the moment the internet seems to be trying to force us to. I wonder if the recent excesses of kindness and cruelty in reviewing serve the same purpose as shouting in a dark cave. How large is the cave? ...

[telt 69 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0909

Probably the fundamental thesis is this: "the innocent eye sees nothing". We see what, in one way or another, we are disposed to see. What disposes us may be in some degree biological, but it is primarily cultural; what we ...

[telt 69 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0909

When I write criticism I’m in such a protected position: here are my arguments, here are my blessed opinions, here is my textual evidence, here my rhetorical flourish. One feels very pleased. Fiction has none of these defences. You are ...

[telt 124 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0915

I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the ...

[telt 113 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0917

We are old nobodies who love what we do. We would be old nobodies even if Oprah and the New York Times best-seller list consecrated us, because we don't want to create illusions around ourselves like so many others have ...

[telt 133 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0917

In the analogue era, writing was read much later than it was written. Digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. A text or tweet is a slightly interrupted, virtual way of having a conversation. An online article starts ...

[telt 102 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0919

Books, like newspapers, are an essentially middle-class phenomenon whose market is the self-improving professional. As a bourgeois medium, books and their authors depend on the cash nexus. Johnson went straight to the point with: "No man but a blockhead ever ...

[telt 54 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0920

I own a lot of books—many that are not wonderful but that I have real affection for, the way one does a hometown. With books, as with cities, good and bad can sometimes seem beside the point. I can either ...

[telt 130 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0922

If the fertility of our culture is what we're concerned about, then McLuhanesque musing on the intrinsic nature of reading (as if it had any such thing) is beside the point. Reading per se is not the issue. The point ...

[telt 67 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0922

Writers are very prone to having unreasonable expectations of reality and its inhabitants – used, as we are, to manipulating fictitious characters and environments, we can tend to assume that nothing in the real world should move on without at ...

[telt 54 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0922

Very few of us write well straight out of the gate. Precocity is more common among poets, perhaps for the simple reason that poems are shorter than stories and novels. Most poetry is built on the flash, the glimpse, the ...

[telt 101 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0923

in this era, writing has so little effect compared to when the novel was at the center of the culture. That kind of impact is totally impossible and you know it, so you have to believe in books as a ...

[telt 167 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0925

it’s just unimaginable to me that writing itself would die out. OK, so where is it going to go? It’s a fluid force: it’ll come up through cracks, it’ll go around corners, it’ll pour down from the ceiling. And I ...

[telt 90 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0926

I was not aware that it is a heresy to hold that Freedom is not a masterpiece. There is something churlish about my friend’s insistence upon critical unanimity. Franzen’s book, after all, is fantastically popular. It is commercially immune from ...

[telt 104 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 0927

Listen, you living writers out there. Write us a masterpiece or two, for chrissake. We need something more solid than Urban Intellectual Fodder. What's with you -- do you want us to die from starvation? Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash, 'Are ...

[telt 47 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1001

We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ...

[telt 103 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1003

Little else can demonstrate as clearly as a shelf of books (or possibly a refrigerator) who we are or imagine ourselves to be. William Germano, 'What are books good for?'

[telt 29 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1004

I click on a few Google articles about Naipaul. Golly gee. He appears to be have been accused of dimensions of vitriol such as I have never heard before. He has been charged with everything from wife-beating, a predilection for ...

[telt 155 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1007

Look at how subtly daring V.S. Naipaul has been, for instance! He has created hybrid forms of autobiography and history and fiction (In a Free State, The Enigma of Arrival), has tried to blur the division between journalism and novel-writing. ...

[telt 112 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1007

when I arrived in Europe with a scholarship after finishing university, I realized that if I continued to think that way, I would never become a writer, that the only way would be to decide officially that literature would be ...

[telt 146 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1008

In the quote from his journals, Emerson mentions expression and growth in the same breath. Self-expression through writing was an almost organic need of his, as if his genius received its daily bread from his pen. For over fifty years ...

[telt 133 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1009

I find the average episode of This American Life to be 99 per cent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction. The juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of ...

[telt 131 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1010

Fiction has developed in unexpected ways since Elizabeth Bowen commanded, in her “Notes on Writing a Novel,” that the “functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the novelist’s mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be ...

[telt 100 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1010

Academic writing has been remarkably resistant to technological change. It survived the typewriter crisis with nary a blip; the word processor, despite its immense advantages, left little or no mark on academic prose, except that really good quotations tended to ...

[telt 124 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1011

The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself. Length may also, ...

[telt 80 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1015

Benjamin's writings are the "Colour Theory" of the twentieth century. If we could agree (and science would almost certainly back us up here) to take his theories on German philology, architectural sociology, media theory and history of philosophy with a ...

[telt 64 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1019

I have only ever met one person – a distinguished arts journalist – who has read all Updike's 60-plus books; most of us, even long-term fans, probably score between 30 and 40. Julian Barnes, on Updike's Rabbit Books Boeklog on Updike

[telt 39 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1021

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it’s been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you’re letting the novel make its own shape, and ...

[telt 130 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1025

During the war Hergé mastered storytelling and drawing, created the undying characters Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus, and worked through the tale of his own bastard descent. He did all this in a collaborationist newspaper. Simon Kuper, 'Tintin and the war' Boeklog ...

[telt 42 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1026

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus ...

[telt 78 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1026

I’m finished with the Bible. Back to drawing pornography. Robert Crumb, Paris Review Interview 'The Art of Comics' Boeklog on Crumb

[telt 19 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1028

A novel which poses questions is more interesting than one which provides answers. Another way of putting it is that a book should be a dialogue between reader and writer, rather than a monologue. It is unlikely, of course, to ...

[telt 141 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1031

When you think about it, that’s pretty much what our education amounts to. We take everything we are told for granted – it must all be true, because someone a little older than we are says so. John Lloyd, 'Ignorance? You'd ...

[telt 48 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1102

The experience of reading so closely mimics the process of consciousness that it attains a unique level of artistic intimacy. Great art permeates the barrier of consciousness; reading obliterates it. It literally happens inside you. How’s that for intimate? So if ...

[telt 104 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1104

"Books have had a kind of spooky power, embedded as they are in the very structures of learning, commerce, and culture by which we have absorbed, stored, and transmitted information, opinion, art, and wisdom," wrote the acclaimed editor Elisabeth Sifton ...

[telt 68 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1104

I came across a copy of 'Howards End' and had a look into it. Not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not ...

[telt 101 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1105

Retreat from the smoothness of technology is not an available option, even if it were desirable. The disbanding of the papers has already occurred, a splendid fluttering of the world’s texts to the winds. We will have to gather them ...

[telt 93 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1105

Every writer has his own voice. (Every serious or dedicated writer.) This is achieved by the way he punctuates; the rhythm of his phrases; the way the writing reflects the processes of the writer’s thought: all the nervousness, all the ...

[telt 69 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1108

Reviews, even when they are fine writing in their own right, even when they are wholly, brilliantly true in a deep way, sometimes make the reviewer look shabby and denuded, his pants at his ankles, his naked knees aquiver. They ...

[telt 89 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1108

Carr’s model for what we might call the ‘book-user’—the contemplative literate subject—is grounded particularly in visions from American Transcendentalism and Romantic poetry. It is Nathaniel Hawthorne sitting meditatively in Concord, Massachusetts, prior to having his concentration broken by the intruding ...

[telt 205 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1111

It was an intuition or maybe even something cognitive after years of writing and editing: If there’s a problem in the sentence, you fix it by going to the verb. Whenever I hit a muddy passage that’s how I straighten ...

[telt 111 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1112

Blogs may be more like private journals with megaphones than reasoned contributions to public life. ... Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the 'revolt of the masses' needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. ...

[telt 57 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1112

Even if you take out the participation bit, plenty of people are speculating that now the book is a screen-based phenomenon, it will become a multimedia event, breaking off into bits of film and augmented reality. That the very word ...

[telt 120 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1112

Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance. Umberto Eco, 'Real literature is about losers'

[telt 16 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1113

If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, you could say that pretentiousness is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius. Sam Leith, 'Pretentious, impenetrable, hard work ... better? Why we need difficult books'

[telt 35 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1114

If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and engagingly said in one, then it's amateur work. Robert Louis Stevenson, as quoted by Robert McCrum

[telt 32 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1114

Long since retired, he was now restricted to a wheelchair and, with time on his hands, had been re-reading old favorites, all the great novels that had inspired a lifetime’s career in reading, writing, teaching. We talked about Faulkner, Fitzgerald, ...

[telt 79 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1115

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. Martin Amis, 'Laureate of Terror'

[telt 40 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1115

Rumpus: Is there a book that most embodies your dad for you? [Nanette] Vonnegut: All of his work makes me hyperventilate, but Slaughterhouse-Five more than any others. Rumpus: Why? Vonnegut: Because it’s so good. Because of the pace of it, because of the ...

[telt 172 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1116

For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is ...

[telt 97 wurden]

Quote of the Day | 1118

I was a normal sort of boy who liked to run around and play games and go to the movies. But I did manage to read enough so that I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to be on ...

[telt 116 wurden]