Writing

Writing

"It's so strange - all the memories are there. And it's not that I don't try and think about it, but going in such a linear manner, it becomes almost more clear when you talk about it this way."

As I grew into a pretentious young adult in the early 00s, I started to want more from games, and I wasn't finding it. So many of them were mindless, or juvenile, or needlessly violent. So few seemed to have anything to say.

Classic France is a country of nuance with a love of conversation and freedom and an aversion to fanaticism. Contemporary Houellebecq describes France as a museum, where landscape turns into decor and where rural areas are emptying out.

The story that stayed with a young Larry McMurtry, more than any of the cowboy exploits, was the one about a molasses barrel. McMurtry's grandfather had traveled by wagon 18 miles to Archer City for winter provisions, returning with an 80-pound barrel of sorghum molasses, the nearest thing to sugar at the time.

I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry. I won't add much to them, but she is someone of incredible integrity.

Helen DeWitt's refusal of the Windham-Campbell prize highlights the tension between artistic integrity and the demands of self-promotion in the literary world.

No one I know wants to go spend their one wild and magical life being a shill for some billionaire tech asshole, says Shannon, a character in Yesteryear, the buzzy new novel about a tradwife influencer by Caro Claire Burke.

I was also trying to hold my own. Honestly, I feel like she's the character I've played who I felt most similar to. I don't know if that's because Tony had also started writing it with me in mind.

You've created a character you can control, because you can't control me.

The Man is so absorbed in his trout-fishing hobby that he won't stop to watch a sunset with The Woman, even though he has romantically brought her to his remote cabin for the first time.

When I finished art school, I thought I was going to do monumental sculpture, big works, and I did for a while. But what I started loving the most-actually always loved the most-was the start, where you figure out what you want to say.

Morris was a sympathetic historian of empire who became a republican Welsh nationalist, and yet she accepted a CBE, showcasing her complex identity.

I moved to New York in 2016, with the intention of staying exactly 12 months: to report on an electric election year and then return home with a chapter of my eventual memoir tucked away in my mind. Instead, I stayed for almost a decade.