The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “famous writers”

Happy Birthday, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 21 Essential Reads on Education
Happy Birthday, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 21 Essential Reads on Education

Bertrand Russell, Richard Feynman, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Isaac Asimov, Kio Stark, and more.

read article

Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters
Italo Calvino on Writing: Selected Wisdom from a Lifetime of Letters

“One writes most of all in order to take part in a collective enterprise.”

read article

How to Make the Perfect Cup of Tea: George Orwell’s 11 Golden Rules
How to Make the Perfect Cup of Tea: George Orwell’s 11 Golden Rules

“One strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.”

read article

Cats, Guns, and Books: William S. Burroughs’s Daily Routine
Cats, Guns, and Books: William S. Burroughs’s Daily Routine

For breakfast, “a salted soft-boiled egg with toast, or perhaps fresh-squeezed lemonade, and two cups of very sweet tea.”

read article

Mary Gordon on the Joy of Notebooks and How Writing by Hand Catalyzes Creativity
Mary Gordon on the Joy of Notebooks and How Writing by Hand Catalyzes Creativity

“However thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.”

read article

Nabokov on Inspiration and the Six Short Stories Everyone Should Read
Nabokov on Inspiration and the Six Short Stories Everyone Should Read

“A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life.”

read article

Editorial Manners 101: Raymond Chandler Tells <em>The Atlantic</em> Off
Editorial Manners 101: Raymond Chandler Tells The Atlantic Off

“Editors do not make enemies by rejecting manuscripts, but by the way they do it.”

read article

Raymond Chandler on Writing: A Lifetime of Wisdom on the Craft from His Private Letters
Raymond Chandler on Writing: A Lifetime of Wisdom on the Craft from His Private Letters

“Writers … have to fight the impulse to live up to someone else’s idea of what they are.”

read article

Joy Williams’s Daily Writing Routine
Joy Williams’s Daily Writing Routine

“…all messages which will fuel the morrow’s pages coming to me in friendly and artful dreams…”

read article

Order to the Chaos of Life: Isabel Allende on Writing
Order to the Chaos of Life: Isabel Allende on Writing

“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)