“Generally I’ve found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
-Stephen Koch
“A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like remembering a song you’ve never heard before.”
-Alexander Chee
“At the same time, the natural autonomy of horizontalism, and its deep reliance on independent, small affinity groups of activists, encourages a constant drive to innovate. This self-overcoming is the engine of our velocity. It grants us the power to wobble, to swerve like a flock of birds and to act in ways that confound our enemy, as events quickly spiral toward the people’s vision.”
-Micah White
“Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth–she read him like a page.”
-Virginia Woolf
“I wrote this as a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan because their work epitomizes salient aspects of the British Empire which remain vibrant. And because as a child I was sick to death of hearing “I am the very model of a modern major general.” I enjoyed writing this, playing with rhyme and language–it was like spitting into their cultural soup.”
-Michelle Cliff
“There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true in gleams and fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
