The Value of Literacy

“I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.”

Octavia Butler

(See also “This is how I read” and “the tyranny of belief in linear time.” (via robertogreco)

A Game of You

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

Neil Gaiman

‘I set myself a schedule of three to five pages a day’

“With more than 40 works, five Man Booker nominations and a win under her belt, does she consider herself prolific? She scoffs at the word. “Joyce Carol Oates is prolific; I’m just old,” she says, drawing out the last word for laughs. At 75, she says writing hasn’t become any easier, listing her main distractions as laundry and emails. She sets herself a “schedule of pages rather than a schedule of times” aiming to write three to five pages a day. “You can cheat by increasing the type size,” she says. “Then you get really motivated and feel like you’re really speeding along.””

Man Booker-winning novelist Margaret Atwood explains how her dystopian visions of future are always inspired by the real world

28 February 1995

“Do very hard things, just for the sake of it.
(A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking that nobody else has ever bothered with it. […] Then the question arises in the mind: ‘Why are they going to all this trouble?’ I like this question. I like any question that makes you start thinking about the ‘outside’ of the experience – because it makes the experience bigger.)”

Brian Eno

Lynda Barry: 2013 National Book Festival

“Cartoonist Lynda Barry appears at the 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival. Speaker Biography: Lynda Barry is a writer and cartoonist who lives in rural Wisconsin. She’s authored 19 books and received numerous awards and honors for her work, including two William Eisner awards, the American Library Association’s Alex award, the Washington State governor’s award, the Wisconsin Library Association’s R.R. Donnelly award and the Museum of Wisconsin Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Newsweek, Time, Salon, Mother Jones, Poetry Magazine and Tin House. She is currently assistant professor in interdisciplinary creativity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Discovery Fellow at the UW Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. Her new graphic novel is “The Freddie Stories.” For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://1.usa.gov/1shC4TC