Swoopers and Bashers, oh my!

 I'll admit right here and now:

I'm a swooper.

How about you?

Umberto Eco

 

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

― Umberto Eco

Tom Stoppard

 "The whole art of movies and in plays is in the control of the flow of information to the audience. . . . how much information, when, how fast it comes. Certain things maybe have to be there three times."

--Tom Stoppard

Edward Albee

 “Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.”

― Edward Albee

Aaron Sorkin

 

"I like dialogue. It sounds like music. What the words sound like are as important to me as what the words mean."

-- Aaron Sorkin

Claude Levi-Strauss

 

"Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing."

Art Spiegelman

 Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

...On the other hand, he SAID it.”
                  ― Art Spiegelman

John Crowley

 

“Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.”

--John Crowley

Robertson Davies

"Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command.”

Stanislaw Lem

 "The question of genres is simply unimportant for me, and very often I turn to different modes of writing. I want to write about things that interest me and in ways that interest me. One could simply say that I attempt certain mental experiments and try to create certain situational models." 

Frank Loesser

 

"I don’t write slowly, it’s just that I throw out fast."

                     –Frank Loesser

Susanna Clarke

"C. S. Lewis said that all of the Narnia books began with the image of a faun in a snowy wood, carrying parcels. Or I might start with a character about which I know very little, just one or two things (for instance that, as a child, he got lost in some Roman ruins). The important thing is that the idea, whatever it is, has roots, that it goes deep down into the imagination, into the unconscious. Because if it has roots, then it will, with a bit of watering and careful pruning, grow into something quite interesting."

–Susanna Clarke

Raymond Chandler

 

"The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off."

                                                           –Raymond Chandler

Sidney Lumet

"Except in two cases, every writer I've worked with has wanted to work with me again. I think one of the reasons is that I love dialogue. Dialogue is not uncinematic. So many of the movies of the thirties and forties that we adore are constant streams of dialogue.

Of course we remember Jimmy Cagney squashing a grapefruit into Mae Clark's face. But does that evoke more affectionate memory than "Here's looking at you, kid"?

          –Sidney Lumet

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To Librarians, with Love

It's National Library Week. This seems like an apt tribute.

 

Agatha Christie

 

“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.”

                                     ― Agatha Christie

Calvin Trillin

 

“A new regulation for the publishing industry: 

The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.”

           -- Calvin Trillin

Roger Angell

 “Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.”

― Roger Angell

Stephen Dobyns

 

“Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop.”

― Stephen Dobyns

Dr. Seuss

 

My great-great-nephew Atticus's first book was, of course, an autographed copy of my own novel. I would not be surprised if his taste leans toward Dr. Seuss at this point. He is, after all, barely five days old. But can you ever be too young for Sherlock Holmes?