A WRITER'S WIT I wonder: when a Jehovah's Witness dies and goes to Heaven, does God hide behind the door and pretend He's not home? ​Brian Celio Author of Catapult Soul ​Born July16, 1981

B. Celio

My Book World

​“Every winter the good old bishop, St. Nicholas, comes in his ship over the sea from Spain. And who is that with him? It is his servant, a little Moor, named Black Pete[r]. They are bringing goodies and toys for the children of Holland” (88).
 
Why? one must ask. For a long time St. Nicholas distributes his gifts in secret until he is discovered, then he spreads his wealth openly. This may be an oddly racist story. I say oddly because it is demeaning, the tale itself employing a racist term: “But if you want Sinterklaas to come, you must be good. And if ever you see a little black boy, be careful how you treat him. He might be Sinterklaas’s darky” (90). At the same time, the tale sets up a lesson for little white Dutch children: “These three made fun of the Moor and laughed at his black skin. Then came good Sinterklaas with an ink well, a huge one. He said, ‘Come, boys, listen here. Leave that little Moor alone. It is not his fault that he is not white like you.’” (90) When the boys do not listen to Sinterklaas, he dips them in the ink well, “black and deep” (90) to teach them a lesson. But does it? Should having black skin be portrayed as a punishment, something one can’t help?

Illustration from 'Tales Told in Holland'

Look, yonder comes the schooner,
            All the way from Spain.
There stands good St. Nicholas,
            Coming back again.
Frisking up and down the deck,
            See his horsie go!
How prettily the pennants
            Flutter to and fro!
His servant smiles upon us--
            With gifts his bags are rich--
Who’s good, shall have some goodies,
            Who’s naughty, gets a switch

A WRITER'S WIT A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. ​Alexander Pope Author of The Rape of the Lock ​Born May 21, 1688

A. Pope

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt. ​Hall Caine Author of The Shadow of a Crime Born May 14, 1853

H. Caine

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? Angela Carter Author of Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales Born May 7, 1940

A. Carter

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong. Arthur Phillips Author of The King at the Edge of the World ​Born April 23, 1969

A. Phillips

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT Youth doesn't need friends—it only needs crowds. ​Zelda Fitzgerald Author of Save Me the Waltz Born July 24, 1900

Z. Fitzgerald

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead. ​Karen Russell, ​Author of Swamplandia! Born July 10, 1981

K. Russell

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT I loathe heterosexual weddings. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It's just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster. ​Rupert Everett Born May 29, 1959

R. Everett

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash through every closet door in the nation. ​Harvey Milk Born May 22,1930

H. Milk

My Book World

APOLOGIES  to my readers: At the last minute I substituted my profile of Garth Greenwell's  book for Alison Smith's. I shall post one of Smith's Name All the Animals in the near future.

A WRITER'S WIT Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved. ​Thorne Smith Born March 27, 1892

T. Smith

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become. ​David Malouf Born March 20, 1934

D. Malouf

My Book World

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. ​Margaret Mitchell Born November 8, 1900

M. Mitchell

My Book World

“It sings, it has color. It has rapture. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticize or regret.” —Theodore Dreiser

“I began once more to be obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life. They came back to me so pressingly, in my sleep, on my walks, at rehearsals, at parties, they became such a burden to me, that I made up my mind there was only one way to be free of them and that was to write them all down in a book” (iv)

A WRITER'S WIT Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head. ​Harold Brodkey ​Born October 25, 1930

H. Brodkey

My Book World

 “‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’
 
But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart: the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and they sky said, ‘No, not there.’” (362).

A WRITER'S WIT There are 500 million people on Facebook*, but what are they saying to each other? Not much. [*Make that 2.3 billion. Google 10/11/19] ​Elmore Leonard Born October 11, 1925

E. Leonard

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center. ​Adam Johnson ​Born July 12, 1967

A. Johnson

My Book World

Sally Field's Memoir Is Powerful
​The Two Real Lolitas
Turning Seventy, Yikes!
Bullets to Bells: A Powerful Collection of Poems
Thinking in Twelves
A Handmaid's Tale: Literature of Witness
Defeating A Fib At Last-1
​Russian Roulette Is a Hot Read
​Life Among the Savages Still Delightful
Shirley Jackson's Haunted Life
Barcelona Photographs

A WRITER'S WIT Thinking it was easy to take a chance on things if you had nothing to lose—politics, ideas, almost anything in fact; from the bottom of the ladder you could safely risk a fall, but the higher that you climbed the more cautious you must be. ​Martin Flavin Born November 2, 1883

M. Flavin

My Book World

1. “The Other Side of the Desk: What I learned about Editing
    When I Became a Literary Agent,” by Susan Rabiner.
 
“It’s the value added by the author to what is essentially a set of facts, stories, and commentary in search of a larger meaning. To conceptualize is to link these facts, stories, and commentary to a compelling point. A successful book proposal offers to take the reader on a journey. It may be one he has taken, in some form, many times before. An author’s concept for the book is her promise [is] that with the benefit of new research, new stories, new insights, and her authorial guiding vision, the reader will see new things on the journey and arrive at a new destination—and even, at the end, be changed by the experience” (77).
 
2. “The Half-Open Door: Independent Publishing and
    Community,” by Jeff Shotts.
            
“There is now, as a result, a vast commercial enterprise around book publishing, where annual profits are valued above cultural currency, books are spoken of in terms of ‘units,’ and readers are sorted by algorithm into categories by which they can be told with increasing accuracy just what it is they want. Commercial values have conflated quantity with quality, and commercial publishers are forced to create the appearance of quality, if there is none, in service of quantity. High advances and movie deals make the news, as do celebrity authors and their book parties and television appearances” (142).
 
3. “Marginalia: On Editing General Nonfiction,” by Matt
​     Weiland.
 
“I also remind the reader that clarity is king. ‘There is nothing that requires more precision, and purity of express, than to write in a familiar style,’ as the great English essayist William Hazlitt put it nearly two hundred years ago. ‘To write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force,and perspicuity. . .’ To me these are the cardinal virtues of strong, convincing English prose. (Hazlitt’s last term, meaning ‘clarity,’ is now, alas, an antique word)” (173).

A WRITER'S WIT The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery. ​Franklin Foer Born July 20, 1974

F. Foer

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett Born April 13, 1906

S. Beckett

My Book World

(Liveright)

“Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate” (25).

A WRITER'S WIT I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others. ​Novala Takemoto Born January 26, 1968

N. Takemoto

My Book World

“Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth” (142-3).

“If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name” (248).

A WRITER'S WIT I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial. ​Patricia Highsmith #bornonthisday January 19, 1921

P. Highsmith

My Book World

“Sworn to secrecy, the women were forbidden from telling anybody what they were doing: not their friends, not their parents, not their family, not their roommates. They were not to let news of their training leak into campus newspapers or disclose it in a letter, not even to their enlisted brother or boyfriend. If pressed, they could say they were studying communications: the routing of ordinary naval messages” (5)