writers&fighters

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."

"We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by Mark Vonnegut

Would like to get my hands on this one. His follow up to his 1975 memoir, Eden Express.

Q. How was it growing up with Kurt Vonnegut as your father?

A. It was both inspiring and terrifying to have him around, to have him talking to himself, banging on the typewriter and sometimes swearing. He was a big guy, 200 pounds and 6 feet 3 inches, who could sometimes be very nice and sometimes be furious because he couldn’t write.

There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, “It’s okay to be an introvert, but I don’t want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.”

While Mortals Sleep by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Release Date: Jan 25, 2011

  "I'm very flattered by the linkage in so far as it exists. I've been admiring John long before I became a writer so the linkage redowns to my benefit considerably. I wish I could write like John Cheever, but I don't feel I do, and I see him do things effortlessly that I couldn't do with a great deal of effort. So the similarities to me aren't as meaningful as the differences."

John Updike on The Dick Cavett Show, October 14, 1981 - Full show with Updike & Cheever HERE from NYT.

"The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life."

"Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play."

"I think the core of serious readers still exists, but it’s not huge. I think that talking about books has absolutely disappeared. I remember back in the '50s and '60s among my friends that if you were in a group of people and if someone brought up a book, you could be sure that maybe half the people had read it. Now, I find that no one ever does that. If they talk about a book it’s a comment and then that’s the end of that. Movies, people can talk about endlessly. And they can bank on the fact that people have seen the movie."

- Philip Roth, Nerve Interview

"She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house."