THANKS!

You are a fabulous bunch of authors! I hope you continue to read and write in as many different ways as possible.
Good luck in all your future pursuits.

Dr. S

WEEK TEN BLOG ENTRY

Here it is...the last week of blog writing. So, for this week we are going to do something brilliant. Write two numbered responses in your blog.

1. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO THIS SUMMER?

--and--

2. WHAT WOULD YOU DO THIS SUMMER IF I GAVE YOU A MILLION DOLLARS?

WEEK TEN READING

Hi there...yes, we have seen quotes about writing already this quarter. Here are some more for your enjoyment this week.

 

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. Mark Twain

 

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort. Clarice Lispector

 

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf

 

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality. James Joyce

 

The first draft of anything is shit. Ernest Hemingway

 

Always be a poet, even in prose. Charles Baudelaire

 

Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable. Gertrude Stein

 

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. Anaïs Nin

 

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. Henry Miller

 

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it. Alain Robbe-Grillet

 

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can. Samuel Beckett

 

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more. Michel Houellebecq

 

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that? Kurt Vonnegut

 

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling. Julio Cortázar

 

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Franz Kafka

 

Reading is more important than writing. Roberto Bolaño

 

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. Ezra Pound

 

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. David Foster Wallace

 

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless. Vladimir Nabokov

 

…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. — And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. Rainer Maria Rilke

WEEK TEN WRITING ABOUT YOU READ

Think about responding in two ways here this week:
 First, which quote struck you most prodoundly?
--or--

Second, considering everything you have written, what was your best writing of the quarter?