Jeanette Winterson on broken hearts and time

Jeanette Winterson: My heart was broken recently and I keep the pieces on the back step in a bucket. A heart can mend but unlike the liver it cannot regenerate. A heart mends but the break line is always visible. Humans are not axolotels; axolotels grow new limbs. A broken heart will mend in time, …

Art is What Gets Away With You

Jeanette Winterson, one of my favorite writers on the meaning, experience, and vitalness of art: Art isn’t what you can get away with … The work tells a different story. Art is what gets away with you. Every encounter with a work of art is an elopement. The seduction of the self, the abandonment of …

David L. Ulin on Tristram Shandy, Zadie Smith, and the Fiction of Apocalypse | Book Marks

They [Tristram Shandy and The Anatomy of Melancholy] are reminders that weirdness, unconventionality, iconoclasm is not contemporary but wholly human, that the books and writers I am looking for are the ones who make it up (as we all must) as they go along.  

The Guiding Greene Light of Harry Crews

“Graham Greene—you’ve probably heard me quote before, because god knows, it’s true—’The writer is doomed to live in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.’ There it is. There it is. Nah, you write things and write things—write a book for instance—and write and write and write and write and write, and you know, it’s not—every writer …

I decided at one point in my life that I never wanted to be anything that would not allow me to be anything else I wanted to be … I ended up being nothing that I can currently identify, which I suppose means I got my wish. Alexander Theroux from “Laura Warholic”