It’s a much more complex world than it seems. And it always was. People are like: ‘Well, you know what black people are like.’ You don’t know what black people are like. Or what white people are like. You have to take people one at a time. And Easy [Rawlins], because he’s a detective, literally has to do that because otherwise he’s never going to understand what’s going on. He can’t prejudge because he is trying to find out what happened. Whenever you write about a detective, that’s how it is.
Walter Mosley (via thesmithian)
modern conjure
“Nobody” Playa Fly. Mane, I’m from Memphis. #neverforget
All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.
Janet Frame (via berfrois)
(via mensahdemary)
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal financial ledger is now available online, including categories such as “Money Earned by Writing since Leaving the Army” and “Zelda’s Earnings.”
Among the revelations: Fitzgerald was a terrible speller, he was equally bad at arithmetic, and he earned less than $2000 for the original publication of Gatsby. (via)Great supplement to Fitzgerald’s notebooks. (“Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby my imaginary eldest brother, Amory my younger, Anthony my worry. Dick my comparatively good brother but all of them far from home.”)
Graffiti 6 - Calm The Storm (by Lisette Hagen)
It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.
Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese novelist, at a symposium of Nobel Laureates in Atlanta, as quoted by Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey (via mythologyofblue)
(Source: room-for-emptiness, via nomuramaya)
palmistry
(Source: crookedcateyes, via thatkindofwoman)
I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
Tom Waits (via thatkindofwoman)
(Source: kitty-en-classe, via thatkindofwoman)
OLD TIMEY LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE
