Charles Dickens

Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights. The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.
-Charles Dickens

André Aciman

The very act of writing has become my way of finding a space and of building a home for myself, my way of taking a shapeless, marshy world and firming it up with paper, the way the Venetians firm up eroded land by driving wooden piles into it.

I write to give my life a form, a narrative, a chronology; and, for good measure, I seal loose ends with cadenced prose and add glitter where I know things were quite lusterless. I write to reach out to the real world, though I know that I write to stay away from a world that is still too real and never as provisional or ambivalent as I'd like it to be. I write to find out who I am; I write to give myself the slip.
-André Aciman

Literary Cows

NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, England, Jan. 28, 2009 United Press International -- A researcher at England's Newcastle University says cows with names tend to be happier and more productive than their nameless fellow cows.

Dr. Catherine Douglas said she analyzed data collected from more than 500 British dairy farms of varying sizes, and found that cows given names by farmers produce an average extra pint and a half of milk per day, adding up to an extra 6,800 gallons a year for an average dairy farm, The Daily Mail reported Wednesday.

Douglas said cows with names also tend to be more docile during milking and are less likely to kick or stomp on farmers.

"Just as people respond better to the personal touch, cows also feel happier and more relaxed if they are given a bit more one-to-one attention," the researcher said.

Douglas said named cows produce less cortisol, a stress hormone that has been tied to lower milk production.

"What our study shows is what many good, caring farmers have long since believed," she said. "By placing more importance on the individual, we not only improve the animals' welfare and their perception of humans, but also increase milk production."
-United Press International

I want to know what happens when we read poetry to the cows.

I woke dreaming of the Guggenheim

I woke dreaming of the Guggenheim
and Frank Lloyd Wright's hawkish face.
My dog stood up placing her paws on the bed
and I hugged her gigantic horse head.
It's time! I was asleep at nine and now it's five thirty.
I am ready for the day. I stop off in my office on my way down the stairs and turn on my computer. I turn on a path of lights in the dark house leading to the dark back yard. I look up and see the big dipper directly overhead. The neighbors in the apartment house nearby are awake. They have their kitchen lights on. They are always up early too. I turn on my kitchen light as if to say hello.

Garcia Lorca

I am thirsty for odors and laughs,
I am thirsty for new poems,
poems with no lilies or moons,
and no love affairs about to fail.
-Garcia Lorca

Swami

I'd love to swim with a swami
in my pajami
and do origami.
Ah me.

Writers' Rooms

The minute I walk into this room of my own, I swear I become a different person. The wife, the mother, the granny, the cook, the cleaner - all vanish, for two or three hours only the writer is left.
-Margaret Forster

The room is the view. I spent quite a lot of my childhood happily looking out of windows: the coming and going of birds, and the weather seemed to be some kind of event, and now when I am not writing I look out of the window in much the same way.
-Adam Phillips

I cleverly chose the worst place in this sunny house - cold, close to a busy street, piled with toys and pans and our only phone - which will, one day, become part of the kitchen. I can't wait.
-Charlotte Mendelson

I have worked in this room since 1992, and wrote Mao: The Unknown Story here. My co-author and husband Jon Halliday has a study on the floor below. We'd meet up at lunchtime and exchange our discoveries.
-Jung Chang

My room is at the top of the house up two flights of stairs, which is very useful as people have to think before they disturb you. I've worked here for 42 years and written all my books and done all my illustrations here. For most of that time my husband, Nigel Kneale, worked next door. It was useful because we could pop into each other's room when one of us had a bad moment. We seemed to come to a stop for lunch at more or less the same moment. It was a very good time; I was very lucky. He used to tell me about the plays he was going to write, and I used to show him my pictures. Sometimes he'd say "isn't that child's head too big?" and he was always right. But he always liked them, otherwise it would have been rather awful.
-Judith Kerr

Before I had kids I used to get up early to write. If I started at 6 or 7am, and was writing well, I would finish by 1pm, sometimes earlier. I can't do that any more because my eight-year-old son is a light sleeper like me and uses the excuse to get up and come in for a chat. I've told the kids they can come in whenever they want, and because they know this they don't actually bother that much. I've read of writers who enforce something like a prison "silent system" on their families, but there are more important things than writing.
-Ronan Bennett

I'm surrounded, it turns out, by as many writing tools as possible: laptop, typewriter, notebooks, file cards, pens. I hadn't quite realised this multi-functional obsession. I tend to take notes on notebooks (always the same pens, the same notebooks). Some notes are copied on to file cards. At other times I just write straight on to the laptop - always distracted by my intermittent attention span and the temptations of the internet.
-Adam Thirlwell

I sit with my back to the beautiful central garden. There is no easy chair. When I am exhausted, I lie on the floor. I like the way the windows go from floor to high ceiling. No curtains. I prefer nothing or shutters. Curtains look like the cloakroom in a monastery. The carpet comes from Christopher Legge and is a mad Matisse Oceania of pineapples and zigzags like a pin-table. It's the kind of carpet everyone else thinks is a mistake. You need a pair of Ray-Bans. But my motto is "bugger beige".
-Craig Raine

Standing Up

I have to work standing at my desk. I focus best this way and is my way of communicating to my body that I am working. I paint, write, read, wash dishes and play bari sax standing up. At the end of the day I crawl into bed and think Wow, who invented lying down.

Jonathan Rosen

The wonderful thing about writing is that it forces you to confront yourself in a way you don't usually have to. That is, needless to say, also the terrible thing.

-Jonathan Rosen


Perhaps it is the need to approach this mystery that explains why I am a grown man who stays home with the nanny when other people are going to work. And why, as I sit in the maid's room proudly overhearing my daughter speak her first words in my language, I find myself hoping I will capture a few forgotten elements of hers.

-Jonathan Rosen

Marge Piercy

There is something so personal and so impersonal at once in the activity that it is addictive. I may be dealing with my own anger, my humiliation, my passion, my pleasure; but once I am working with it in a poem, it becomes molten ore. It becomes "not me." And the being who works with it is not the normal, daily me. It has no sex, no shame, no ambition, no net. It eats silence like bread. I can't stay in that white-hot place long, but when I am in it, there is nothing else. All the dearness and detritus of ordinary living falls away, even when that is the stuff of the poem. It is as remote as if I were an archaeologist working with the kitchen midden of a 4,000-year-old city.

I am still a good interviewer and a good listener because I am madly curious about what people's lives are like and what they think about them and say about them and the silences between the words.

-Marge Piercy

Alice Hoffman

Writers don't choose their craft; they need to write in order to face the world.
-Alice Hoffman

Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.
-Alice Hoffman

Caroline Knapp

I once heard a woman who had lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue and without a dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give, dogs can introduce us to several colors with names like wildness, nurturance, trust and joy.
-Caroline Knapp

The Face In The Toyota

The Face In The Toyota

Suppose you see a face in a Toyota
One day, and you fall in love with that face,
And it is Her, and the world rushes by
Like dust blown down a Montana street.

And you fall upward into some deep hole,
And you can't tell God from a grain of sand.
And your life is changed, except that now you
Overlook even more than you did before;

And these ignored things come to bury you,
And you are crushed, and your parents
Can't help anymore, and the woman in the Toyota
Becomes a part of the world that you don't see.

And now the grain of sand becomes sand again,
And you stand on some mountain road weeping.

-Robert Bly

Things To Think

Things To Think

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his
antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's
about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that
it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

-Robert Bly

Geraldine Brooks

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.
-Geraldine Brooks

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Sue Miller

Do we writers need to shed our bathrobes, get dressed at last and shuffle blinking out of our studies into the bright light of day, find jobs as laborers or insurance executives or physicians or models or pimps in order to have something wilder, something more exciting, something more relevant to contemporary life to write about?

Surely not. Surely the writer's job is to make relevant the world she wishes to write about. How? By writing well and carefully and powerfully. By using humor, as Cheever did; or violence, as O'Connor did; or rue, as Chekhov did, to make the territory of her imagination compelling and somehow universal. And that holds true whether the territory of the imagination is close to the literal truth of her life or far from it.

-Sue Miller

William Saroyan

There is no how to it, no how do you write, no how do you live, how do you die. If there were, nothing would live in the deep and very delicate chain of life. It is the doing that makes for continuance. It is not the knowing of how the doing is done.

-William Saroyan

Elie Wiesel

Now with the passing of years I know that the fate of books is not unlike that of human beings: some bring joy, others anguish. Yet one must resist the urge to throw away pen and paper. After all, authentic writers write even if there is little chance for them to be published; they write because they cannot do otherwise, like Kafka's messenger who is privy to a terrible and imperious truth that no one is willing to receive but is nonetheless compelled to go on.

Were he to stop, to choose another road, his life would become banal and sterile. Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.

-Elie Wiesel

Morning Poems

Something about poetry in the morning
it's a marriage I cannot refuse.
The purity of the page, the leaping ideas
I can't hear the news of the world at this hour
Only the voice of my heart whispering in my ear.
I even take naps to wake up to poetry again.