I haven't actually laid eyes on the book, but here are a few "astonishing insights and profound quips" one should find in its pages:
George Saunders: "I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really, viscerally, believe that everything matters, suffering is real, and death is imminent."
Ian McEwan: "The dream, surely, that we all have, is to
write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."
Jamaica Kincaid: "All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself--though, thank god I had never committed them to paper--I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore."
Janet Malcolm: "The narrator of my nonfiction pieces is not the same person I am--she is a lot more articulate and thinks of much cleverer things to say than I usually do."
Paul Auster: "In my own case, I certainly don't walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door. I don't burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I'd probably shoot myself in the foot."
Tobias Wolff: "Each time out should be a swing for the fences. Don't do base-running drills. You can do those on your own time."
--Marshal Zeringue
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