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Notes"Work saves more souls than love."David Gilmour
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Notes"I will never be interviewed by you. You are the worst journalist in this country. You are never objective. You make up stories. You lie all the time, and you put yourself in the middle of everything. Why don’t you switch to literature, where all of these defects are virtues?"Pablo Neruda, to Isabel Allende (1973)
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Notes"The people who talk too much either feel too unworthy, or too worthy."Brian Brett
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Notes"Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don’t get out much. It’s true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well."Tom Waits
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Notes"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."Bertrand Russell
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Poe…
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Notes"A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch."Kingsley Amis
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Notes“In 1993, [my wife] and I vacationed together in Tahiti. I remember reading a book called “The Doomsday Conspiracy,” by Sidney Sheldon. Up until this point, almost all my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.) and I’d read almost no commercial fiction at all since “The Hardy Boys” as a child. The Sheldon book was unlike anything I’d read as an adult. It held my attention, kept me turning pages, and reminded me how much fun it could be to read. The simplicity of the prose and efficiency of the storyline was less cumbersome than the dense novels of my schooldays, and I began to suspect that maybe I could write a “thriller” of this type one day. This inkling, combined with my musical frustrations at that time, planted the seed that perhaps I could write books for a living.”, Dan Brown
So we have Sidney Sheldon to blame…. -
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From shop windows to prisons, writers-in-residence find new homes
Some seek a new version of the traditional sanctum where they can devote themselves wholly to their work – without paying rent. “I was honoured and thrilled to have a space with a door that closed,” says Manitoba children’s and young adult writer Anita Daher, author of Spider Song and the first-ever writer-in-residence at Winnipeg’s Aqua Books. “It was a room of my own when I didn’t have one, and there’s nothing nicer for a writer than being surrounded by books.”
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Notes"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it."Voltaire
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Notes"Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions."Khwāja Shamsu d-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī (1325/1326 - 1389/1390)
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Notes"How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling: i.e. it is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of ‘exploiting’ his workers more successfully (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). If that had been the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: people would have chosen free systems like Linux which are as good as or better than Microsoft products. Millions of people are still buying Microsoft software because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, meaning collective knowledge in all its forms, from science to practical knowhow. Gates effectively privatised part of the general intellect and became rich by appropriating the rent that followed from that. The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge." -
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Today in History - January 11, 1903
Cry, The Beloved Country author Alan Paton born in Pietermaritzburg. In 1953, Paton founded the Liberal Party of South Africa, which fought against the apartheid legislation introduced by the National Party. He died before Little Steven was able to play at Sun City.
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Today in History - January 9, 1908
French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir born in Paris. She would become famous for The Second Sex, her proto-feminist tract.
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Notes"The worst effect of the censorship is the psychological impact on writers. When I was working on my first book, I didn’t care whether it would be published, so I wrote whatever I wanted. Now, after I have published a few books, I can clearly feel the impact of censorship when I write. For example, I’ll think of a sentence, and then realize that it will for sure get deleted. Then I won’t even write it down. This self-censoring is the worst."Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun
