February 2012
19 posts
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AUSTIN KLEON: On advertising: Banksy vs. Gossage →
austinkleon:
This Banksy quote from Cut It Out has been making the rounds:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from…
See also: The Billboard Liberation Front.
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My Big Ambition was to do Nothing
Question: When your friends said they wanted to be writers, what did you want to be instead? What did you think you could do? Deborah Eisenberg: I didn’t think I could do anything and my big ambition was to do nothing. But, of course, the matter of supporting myself did intrude.
From an excellent and very funny interview with Deborah Eisenberg at The Days of Yore.
I share this big ambition at...
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“I do think there are interesting things to be said about the relationship...”
– Will Self in a Guardian story about his appointment as “professor of contemporary thought” at Brunel University. (Nice work if you can get it.)
What the Dickens? →
austinkleon:
“If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.”
— Charles Dickens on his 20-miles-a-day walking habit
Twenty miles a day? Plus all that writing? I’m guessing Boz didn’t need much sleep.
Yes
khealywu:
“If what’s always distinguished bad writing— flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.— is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret Easton] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant...
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