Lynn Coady Quotes
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Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight.
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The creative process taps into our deepest subconscious, and we are each of us sex-crazed - products of a shame-based Judeo-Christian culture that has irrevocably warped us all to varying degrees.
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Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.
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I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn't very good at it. It wasn't where I wanted to be ultimately.
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A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form.
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As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation.
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When you're not sure your anger is justified, the thing to do is ask yourself exactly where it's coming from.
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Here's the thing about lingerie: The only time we see it outside our own bedrooms, it is on women who are gloriously freakish in their physical perfection.
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The process of writing a story isn't about fair. It's about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong.
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A dominant misconception among believers is that their atheist brethren are a slavering pack of hell-bound debauchees, gleefully wining and wenching their way through life while loudly professing their amorality.
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Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.
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We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.
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You can't hint a man into bestowing the ideal gift that displays all the love, appreciation and understanding you feel is lacking the rest of year.
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That's what fascinates me about these writers' retreats: You're in these small spaces with small groups of people, and all of the sudden, the spotlight is shining on you harder than it normally is.
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I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance.
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Guys know how to read each other's signals. They know how to telegraph love for one another without throwing their arms around one another.
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Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes.
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Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer's dilemma, I'll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist.
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I decided a long time ago to be myself and not worry too much about cultivating some kind of personality that didn't feel natural or true to who I am.
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No matter how committed a marriage, there will always be other people - those we have chemistry with and those we don't, those we are attracted to, and those who shop for functional outdoors wear. The sooner a couple can accept the existence of the former and exchange a few basic reassurances concerning them, the easier life gets.
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True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways.
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The one thing I've always done as an author is talk to my publicists. Because they have all the best stories - and they have all the dirt on other, more famous and important writers. They're not supposed to talk about it, but sometimes you can get awesome little tidbits from them.
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Most don't live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas.
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One does not become an atheist out of a desire for hassle-free Sunday mornings. People come to atheism because they have a problem with organized religion - usually a problem they consider to be of moral urgency.