“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
Stephen King. On Writing
“En mi opinión, a los madridistas, barcelonistas y otros seguidores habituados a los éxitos les pasa un poco eso. No han tenido tiempo de forjarse una fe a prueba de cualquier fiasco. ¿Pierden una final? No pasa nada, ya han ganado finales antes y dan por supuesto que las ganarán después, más pronto o más tarde. Pueden sentirse tristes, pero jamás han experimentado el auténtico vacío existencial de quienes sospechan, con bastante fundamento, que su dios se ha largado para siempre. Que legarán a sus descendientes una fe hecha de esperanzas incumplidas. Que todo este sufrimiento solo puede tener una explicación metafísica y que no obtendrán la recompensa en este mundo. Solo quienes padecen ese vacío se acercan al fútbol de una manera realmente religiosa.”
Enric González. Una cuestión de fe
“In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.”
Jhumpa Lahiri. My Life’s Sentences
“Yet there was a measure of uncertainty surrounding that very thought—a thought he was so used to having he couldn’t keep from it. Maybe it was true that even though he liked her, liked the frankness and direct nature of her conduct toward him, intimacy was not what he wanted. She appealed to him in a surprising way, but he was not physically attracted to her. And maybe, he thought, looking at her across the table, an intimacy with him was the last thing on earth she was interested in.”
Richard Ford. The womanizer. Women with Men
“No hay nada más pasado de moda que lo que recién pasó de moda, ¿no crees?”
Alberto Fuguet. Por favor, rebobinar
“You think everybody does something for some peculiar reason. You don’t think anybody calls anybody else up without having some nasty, selfish reason for it.”
J.D. Salinger. Franny and Zooey
“Toda mi vida me he considerado no normal, excepcional, a la vez maravilloso y monstruoso, lo cual no es inquietante cuando eres adolescente pero sí lo es a mi edad, y por mucho que vaya tres veces por semana al psicoanalista cada vez veo menos razones para que esto cambie.”
Emmanuel Carrère. Una novela rusa
“Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can’t use he often can’t see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn’t correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn’t try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.”
Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie March
“I’m still waiting for somebody who got caught lying while practicing journalism to say why he did it. I have my theory: 1) They lie because they don’t have the time or talent to tell the truth, 2) they lie because they think they can get away with it, and 3) they lie because they have no respect for the audience they claim to want to enlighten.”
Jack Shafer. Busting Mr. Daisey
“Be careful what you get good at doin’ ’cause you’ll be doin’ it the rest of your life.”
Gabrielle Hamilton. Blood, Bonnes & Butter
