Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.
I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.
Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.
All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.
With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause.
When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal.
Woody makes a movie as if he were lighting 10,000 safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one is a little epiphany: topical, ethnic, or political.
They can pump whatever they want into my arm but it takes more than that to keep a person going once she's lost the will to live.
Nothing in the past is as powerful as what we choose to do in the present moment.
Im interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.