A WRITER'S WIT A couple of hanging glands have nothing to do with making someone a man. ​Cynthia Nixon Starred in Sex and the City ​Born April 9, 1966

C. Nixon

My Book World

facts omitted from history:

Some of these elusive facts: 1) In the early 1700s there existed the term maroon, a runaway slave; the accompanying form, marronage meaning extricating oneself from slavery— which caused American slave owners no small amount of worry. 2) “Georgia was the only colonial region that issued a ban on slavery from its inception in 1733” (150). 3) “While many historians describe Reconstruction as a period of ‘racial unrest’ marked by lynchings and ‘race riots,’ it was undoubtedly a war. The network of terror cells that sprang up during Reconstruction was no different from the organized militias of the American Revolution or the ragtag Confederate squads” (235). The Civil War, in other words, has never really ended. The U.S. did not have the guts or will to return troops in the South to enforce Reconstruction policy, thus giving the South a back-door victory. 4) 1.2 million Black men and women served in WWII but came home to no hero’s welcome (307). 5) “Ella Baker, someone who should be much better known, was critical in the organizing that emerged from the sit-ins. Her activism brought together generations of Black struggle. The 1960 surge in youth activism drew her immediate attention . . . Baker was the SCLC’s temporary executive director and one of the South’s most respected political organizers. As the NAACP director of branches in the 1940s, she had organized chapters throughout the region” (326). 6) “The real story was that the real estate industry and mortgage bankers were fleecing African Americans with an assist from an utterly passive federal government” (337). 7) “In Clarence Thomas, a forty-three-year-old African American Republican from Pinpoint, Georgia, with only two years of experience as a federal judge, Bush found the ideal candidate to help him appeal to both these constituencies [white conservatives and right-leaning Blacks]” (361). 8) “In 2019 alone, more than 250 people in the United States were killed in mass shootings. The overwhelming majority of the shooters were white nationalists” (385).

A WRITER'S WIT You can always find time to do the thing you really, really want to do. ​Jennifer Rowe Author of The Lake of Tears ​Born April 2, 1948

J. Rowe

MY BOOK WORLD

A WRITER'S WIT Do what thy manhood bids thee do,           from none but self expect applause; He noblest lives and noblest dies who           makes and keeps his self-made laws. ​Richard F. Burton Author of The City of the Saints Born March 19, 1821

R. F. Burton

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT I write to find out what I'm talking about. Edward Albee Author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962 play) Born March 12, 1928

E. Albee

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character. ​Elizabeth George Author of The Punishment She Deserves Born February 26, 1949

E. George

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. ​Amy Tan Author of The Joy Luck Club Born February 19, 1952

A. Tan

My Book World

“So avoid or minimise any reference to the mechanics of making love—unless it advances our understanding of character or affective situation. All we usually need to know is how it went and what it meant. ‘Caress the detail,’ said Nabokov from the lectern. And it is excellent advice. But don’t do it when you’re writing about sex” (27).
 
Knopf typo: “obviouly” (221).
 
“Never use any phrase that bears the taint of the second-hand. All credit to whoever coined no-brainer and (I suppose) to whoever coined go ballistic and Marxism lite and you rock and eye-popping and jaw-dropping and double whammy and all the rest of them. Never do it—not even in conversation” (391).
 
The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided. And with any luck your closing words will feel preordained (394).

A WRITER'S WIT I grew up in an affluent suburban world and never worried about money until I'd grown up and found wonderfully original ways to screw up my life. ​K. A. Applegate Author of The One and Only Ivan Born October 9, 1956

K. A. Applegate

“. . . he fixed on his round eyes and plump lips as physiognomic signs of weakness; more to the point, he thought they made him look feminine, ‘bubbly,’ and he had a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual” (39). Hm, I wonder why, with the mother thing he has going on.
 
Friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut writes about war: “People don’t recover from a war. There’s a fatalism that he [Yates] picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survival. Death doesn’t matter that much” (75).
 
Friend and former student DeWitt Henry notes: “Dick cultivated an anti-intellectual manner, but there was nothing phony or affected about it. In places like the army and tuberculosis wards he was put in contact with unlettered people, who were just as sensitive as anybody else” (78). Yates did his best to capture natural intelligence in characters, and, in life, in his teaching at the Iowa Workshop, he landed hard on any, any arrogant student who put another’s writing down.
 
Yates discovers what the term “objective correlative” means: “I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase ‘objective correlative’ until the scene in Gatsby  where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explain that they are ‘the finest specimens of human molars.’ Get it? Got it. That’s  what Eliot meant” (109). He now gets that Wolfsheim, true to his naturalistic name, traffics in human flesh and uses his understanding to find such tokens for his own characters.
“Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the ‘objective correlative’—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without laboring the point” (175)
 
“The only hope of escape was to write a successful novel—the raw material of which, he already sensed, would be the stuff of his own predicament. But he wanted to transcend the merely personal, to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment and self-pity” (175).
 
Bailey comments on claims of French critic, Jacques Cabau, that Yates is a master: “Not surprisingly the Frenchman was especially pleased by Yates’s insights into the hollowness of American life: ‘Eleven Kinds of Loneliness—a courageous theme in America, where loneliness is a sin, where success is obligatory and happiness is the first duty of every citizen’” (271).
 
Long-term friend and publisher, Sam Lawrence, says at Yates’s funeral (more of a come-as-you-are wake): “‘He drank too much, he smoked too much, he was accident-prone, he led an itinerant life, but as a writer he was all in place. He wrote the best dialogue since John O’Hara, who also lacked the so-called advantages of Harvard and Yale. And like O’Hara he was a master of realism, totally attuned to the nuances of American behavior and speech. You know what I think he would have said to all this? ‘C’mon, Sam, knock it off. Let’s have a drink’” (607).
​

A WRITER'S WIT Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always. ​Mahatma Gandhi Author of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobigraphy: The Story of My Experiments with Truth Born October 2, 1869

M. Gandhi

My Book World

“Your mother . . . was the one who actually called my attention to the number of boxes I have filled with my sermons and my prayers. Say, fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they average thirty pages, that’s sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages . . . two hundred twenty-five books which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity” (19).

We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy. ​Chris Hedges Author of America: The Farewell Tour Born September 18, 1956

C. Hedges

My Book World

Cockring realizes early: “I have to be: to accept life as it happens, to be still and rest in knowing the universe is friendly, that good things will come, that good things are already here, that ‘good things’ include tidying her house, getting her car serviced, sorting her pills, surrendering my needs to hers” (91).

A WRITER'S WIT We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up. ​Phyllis Diller, ​Author of The Joys of Aging and How to Avoid Them Born July 17, 1917

P. Diller

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 The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses. ​Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Author of The Yellow Wallpaper Born July 3, 1860

C. Perkins Gilman

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT We always look at the “Fortune 500,” and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards. ​Warren Farrell, ​Author of The Boy Crisis ​Born June 26, 1943

W. Farrell

My Book World

A WRITER'S WIT The mind and heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens to the poor old human frame, why, it’s just out of luck, that’s all. ​Katherine Anne Porter Born May 15, 1890

K. A. Porter

My Book World

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 Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. ​Jorge Luis Borges ​Born August 24, 1899

J. Borges

My Book World

“But there’s a literary form I haven’t mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the world’s indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her secret annex” (xviii).
 
Atwood concludes her remarks with the following statement:
 
“In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades and indeed the past centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere—many, I would guess—are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record later, if they can.
     Will their message be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall?
     Let us hope it doesn’t come to that. I trust it will not” (xix).

A WRITER'S WIT Write every day. Don't kill yourself. I think a lot of people think, “I have to write a chapter a day,” and they can't. They fall behind and stop doing it. But if you just write even one hundred words a day, it's not that much. By the end of a month, you'll have three thousand words, which is one chapter. ​Cassandra Clare Born on July 27, 1973

C. Clare

My Book World

“He imagined himself as the little boy he had been at that time, shattered and mad at heart, but with a ferocious, heroic persona, which had eventually stopped his father’s abuses with a single determined refusal. He knew that if he was going to understand the chaos that was invading him, he would have to renounce the protection of that fragile hero, just as he had to renounce the illusion of his mother’s protection by acknowledging that his parents had been collaborators as well as antagonists” (855-6).
 
“He was after all not an infant, but a man experiencing the chaos of infancy welling up in his conscious mind. As the compassion expanded he saw himself on equal terms with his supposed persecutors, saw his parents, who appeared to be the cause of his suffering, as unhappy children with parents who appeared to be the cause of their suffering: there was no one to blame and everyone to help, and those who appeared to deserve the most blame needed the most help” (856)