The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “writing”

The Psychology of What Makes a Great Story
The Psychology of What Makes a Great Story

“The great writer’s gift to a reader is to make him a better writer.”

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Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, the Art of Revision, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers
Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, the Art of Revision, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”

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The Outsider with the Public Voice: How Joan Didion Mirrored Us Back to Ourselves
The Outsider with the Public Voice: How Joan Didion Mirrored Us Back to Ourselves

“From the first, her work insisted that a single life contained the life of our times.”

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Creative Magic and What Makes a Great Writer: Joseph Conrad’s Beautiful Tribute to Henry James
Creative Magic and What Makes a Great Writer: Joseph Conrad’s Beautiful Tribute to Henry James

“All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind.”

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David Foster Wallace on Why You Should Use a Dictionary, How to Write a Great Opener, and the Measure of Good Writing
David Foster Wallace on Why You Should Use a Dictionary, How to Write a Great Opener, and the Measure of Good Writing

“Really good writing [is] able to get across massive amounts of information and various favorable impressions of the communicator with minimal effort on the part of the reader.”

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Donald Hall on Growing Old and Our Cultural Attitude Toward the Elderly
Donald Hall on Growing Old and Our Cultural Attitude Toward the Elderly

“When kindness to the old is condescending, it is aware of itself as benignity while it asserts its power.”

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The Problem of Shakespeare’s Sister: Virginia Woolf on Gender in Creative Culture
The Problem of Shakespeare’s Sister: Virginia Woolf on Gender in Creative Culture

“To write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire.”

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Willa Cather on Productivity vs. Creativity and the Life-Changing Advice That Made Her a Writer
Willa Cather on Productivity vs. Creativity and the Life-Changing Advice That Made Her a Writer

“It’s so foolish to live (which is always trouble enough) and not to save your soul. It’s so foolish to lose your real pleasures for the supposed pleasures of the chase — or the stock exchange.”

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Lost NYU Lecture on What It Takes to Be a Writer, Animated
Kurt Vonnegut’s Lost NYU Lecture on What It Takes to Be a Writer, Animated

“Nothing means anything — except the artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole, though no such holes exist.”

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John Steinbeck’s Prophetic Dream About How the Commercial Media Machine Is Killing Creative Culture
John Steinbeck’s Prophetic Dream About How the Commercial Media Machine Is Killing Creative Culture

Half a century before Buzzfeed, a nocturnal epiphany about the greatest threat to art.

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