“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
-James Baldwin
The Simile Museum
Tag: Paris Review
December 2, 2018
“There is something feckless about a writer’s journals. They are a specialist’s document, and those who parse their pages are like grooming baboons, searching for fleas.”
-Dustin Illingworth
February 1, 2018
“You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
-James Baldwin
November 20, 2017
“A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little micro-climate. “
-Claire Dederer
May 17, 2017
“I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier.”
-Anne Carson
March 8, 2015
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”
-Joan Didion
November 24, 2014
“He told me I was the sign he’d been waiting for and,
like looking into a crystal ball, he’d just read a private message from God
in the silvery vortex of my left pupil.”
-Ottessa Moshfegh
The Simile Museum 