Quote of the Day (Tobias Wolff, on Writers Apart)

“Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege—the power to create images of the system they stood apart form, and thereby to judge it.” —Tobias Wolff, Old School: A Novel (2003)

(The photo of Tobias Wolff accompanying this post was taken in April 2008 at an event at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, Calif., for Wolff’s short story collection OUR STORY BEGINS.)

Quote of the Day (A.L. Kennedy, on the True Nature of Writers’ Insights)

“People assume that writers are terribly insightful and good at being with or reading other people. But the people we portray are, of course, people we made up and therefore very accessible to us. We hopefully make mankind our study and gain benefits from that. We are also human beings who spend huge amounts of time alone, obsessed by the fruits of our own control-freakery. So our research into humanity may make us smart about certain things, but if you get us on a bad day we may not notice if you’re on fire. (When I say ‘we’ I mean ‘me.’)” — Scottish writer and stand-up comedian A.L. Kennedy quoted in Claire Cameron, “Claire Cameron Interviews A.L. Kennedy: ‘Marry Someone Who Makes You Laugh,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 11, 2014

Bonus Quote of the Day (Gustave Flaubert, on Why He Would Not Marry)

“The artist, in my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the woes with which Providence showers him come from the stubbornness with which he dies that axiom. His refusal to admit it brings suffering not only to him, but to those with whom he is in contact. Ask women who have loved poets, or men who have loved actresses. So (and this is my conclusion) I am resigned to living as I have lived; alone, with a throng of great men rather than a social circle, with my bear-rug (bearing a bear myself), etc. I care nothing for the world, for the future, for what people will say, for any kind of established position, or even for literary fame, which in my early days I used to stay awake so many nights dreaming about. That is what I am like; that is my character.”—French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), in a letter to his mother, from Constantinople, December 15, 1850, quoted in Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, by Francis Steegmuller (1939)

Quote of the Day (Philip Roth, on the Artist’s Task)

“As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, a la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself -- for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized.” ―Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (1998)

Quote of the Day (Chloe Schama, on When Writers Break Up)

“When two writers meet, and fall in love, and break up, and then begin to write, is this competition impossible to avoid? Even in nonfiction, truth one can butt up against truth two. I haven’t intentionally invented anything here, but if Sam swore that he’d sent those freshman-year notes to my campus mailbox rather than slipping them under my door as I remember, would I vehemently disagree? Did we really send letters to his parents’ house? (Or do I just read too many 19th-century novels and like the antique feel of a “poste restante”?) Would Sam even remember the overgrown plant, which has become for me a symbol of a love that no longer fit?

“More important, does it matter if our accounts diverge? Probably not, and not just because one is nominally fiction. Fiction or non — there’s no such thing as a single truth when you’re writing the story of a breakup.”— Chloe Schama, “First Person: Never Date a Writer. You’ll End Up As Material,” New York Magazine, December 11, 2014

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Big Bang Theory,’ In Which Penny Meets a Writer)

Penny (played by Kaley Cuoco) (accidentally nudging the man sitting behind her): “Oh, sorry.”

Man (played by Blake Berris):” No problem.”

Penny: “What you writing there?”

Man: “A screenplay. It’s about a guy whose roommate is having sex and tells him go to a bar and work on his screenplay.”

Penny: “I Hope Alex Gets Crabs: The Movie.”

Man: “It’s a working title.”

Penny: “Oh.”

Man: “I’m Kevin.”

Penny: “Oh. Penny. Nice to meet you….So, have you written anything I might have seen?”

Kevin: “That depends. How much time do you spend on Yelp?"—The Big Bang Theory, “The Ornithophobia Diffusion,” Season 5, Episode 9, teleplay by Bill Prady, Steven Molaro and Eric Kaplan, directed by Mark Cendrowski, air date November 10, 2011

(Thanks to my friend Brian for the tip.)