Darcy

“The term inspiration is often thought to be about positive and desirable things, and there’s a sentimental image of the muse as a pretty lady who’s the object of the writer’s ardor. For a political writer the inspirations or at least the prods to write are often whatever is most repellent and alarming, and opposition is a stimulant. Stalin was surely Orwell’s principal muse, if not as a personality then as the figure at the center of a terrifying authoritarianism wreathed in lies.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“Unlike most people I don’t fear death, as I get older I rediscover my long-forgotten youth, and once in a while, when the going gets tough, I bury myself comfortably in my work. My books already guarantee me a form of immortality.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Interventions 2020

“she got into an argument with another actress about Spielberg’s The Color Purple. Jenna said it was shit and the other woman, nodding, said, ‘Yeah, right, the book was better.’ And Paul, laughing, continues, ‘And you said, “Nah, the book was shit as well.”’ Shaking his head in astonishment, earnest now, he says, ‘And I thought, Wow, you Aussies don’t hide behind bullshit. We Americans go on about honesty and our feelings and being straight talkers, but you Aussies really are like that.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Seven and a Half

“do want to write a good story. But I no longer trust the judgements of my age. The critic now assesses the writer’s life as much as her work. The judges award prizes according to a checklist of criteria created by corporations and bureaucrats. And we writers and artists acquiesce, fearful of a word that might be misconstrued or an image that might cause offence. I read many of the books nominated for the globalised book prizes; so many of them priggish and scolding, or contrite and chastened. I feel the same way about those films feted at global festivals and award ceremonies. It’s not even that it is dead art: it’s worse, it’s safe art. Most of them don’t even have the dignity of real decay and desiccation: like the puritan elect, they want to take their piety into the next world. Their books and their films don’t even have the power to raise a good stench. The safe is always antiseptic.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Seven and a Half