If a turtle is a story, then
it's turtles all the way down...

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Books that have changed the way I write

Five great books



Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, by Ken Kessey

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller

The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce




Not that you give a shit, but these books are all works of sublime beauty. And if there were any justice in the world, you and everyone else would have read them already by now. But hey, maybe that's part of their magic. Nobody cares. (Or maybe you do care and maybe you have read them, in which case I'm a horse's ass)

No generation wants to make a world where Van Gogh's fate is repeated. We just can't help it.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. Talent and success interest me but moderately. The great class, they who affect our imagination, the men and women who could not make their hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas - they suggest what they cannot execute. They speak to the ages, and are heard from afar. -RWE

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