The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “writing”

A Decadent Decade of Design Matters: 10 Years of Intelligent and Inspiring Interviews with Creative Icons
A Decadent Decade of Design Matters: 10 Years of Intelligent and Inspiring Interviews with Creative Icons

Stimulating, ennobling, deeply human conversations with Maira Kalman, Seth Godin, Dani Shapiro, Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Ware, Shepard Fairey, and more.

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Pulitzer-Winning Poet Mark Strand on the Heartbeat of Creative Work and the Artist’s Task to Bear Witness to the Universe
Pulitzer-Winning Poet Mark Strand on the Heartbeat of Creative Work and the Artist’s Task to Bear Witness to the Universe

“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”

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The Art of Tough Love: Samuel Beckett Models How to Give Constructive Feedback on Your Friends’ Creative Work
The Art of Tough Love: Samuel Beckett Models How to Give Constructive Feedback on Your Friends’ Creative Work

“If I were less concerned with you I should simply say it is very good.”

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Pearl S. Buck, the Youngest Woman to Receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on Art, Writing, and the Nature of Creativity
Pearl S. Buck, the Youngest Woman to Receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on Art, Writing, and the Nature of Creativity

“The creative instinct is … an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual… — an energy which no single life can consume.”

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The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing
The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing

“The books that give us the most pleasure, the deepest pleasure, combine uncertainty and satisfaction, tension and release.”

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How to Work Through Difficulty: Lewis Carroll’s Three Tips for Overcoming Creative Block
How to Work Through Difficulty: Lewis Carroll’s Three Tips for Overcoming Creative Block

“When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on.”

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The Paradox of Intellectual Promiscuity: Stephen Jay Gould on What Nabokov’s Butterfly Studies Reveal About the Unity of Creativity
The Paradox of Intellectual Promiscuity: Stephen Jay Gould on What Nabokov’s Butterfly Studies Reveal About the Unity of Creativity

“There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.”

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Jane Austen’s Advice on Writing, in Letters to Her Teenage Niece
Jane Austen’s Advice on Writing, in Letters to Her Teenage Niece

Epistles on the fine art of “speeding truth into the world.”

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On “Beauty”: Marilynne Robinson on Writing, What Storytelling Can Learn from Science, and the Splendors of Uncertainty
On “Beauty”: Marilynne Robinson on Writing, What Storytelling Can Learn from Science, and the Splendors of Uncertainty

“We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.”

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The Art of Quickness: Italo Calvino on Digression as a Hedge Against Death and the Key to Great Writing
The Art of Quickness: Italo Calvino on Digression as a Hedge Against Death and the Key to Great Writing

“Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search… for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.”

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