My adrenaline started pumping anytime I was within a hundred yards of a bookshop. I loved books nearly as much as I loved clothes. And that's saying something. The feel of them and the smell of them. A bookshop was like like an Aladdin's Cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look.

Hilma Wolitzer

Categorized in : Book Clothes Smell

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

lonely loneliness fun

The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide. by Hilma Wolitzer

The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide.

goal teaching suicide

There must be a balance of honesty and charity in the workshop. Everyone must be aware of a fellow human being behind the work being discussed, and criticism has to be useful, not just derogatory or laudatory.

honesty criticism teaching

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

lonely writing character

hardly anything in L.A. was close to anywhere else you wanted to... by Hilma Wolitzer

hardly anything in L.A. was close to anywhere else you wanted to go.

los-angeles wanted

Time pulses from the afternoon like blood from a serious wound. by Hilma Wolitzer

Time pulses from the afternoon like blood from a serious wound.

pulse time blood

Jews, Germans, and Allies is an important historical document, especially in light of those revisionists who would impose a universal amnesia about the suffering and losses incurred during the Holocaust. The grim statistics that Ms. Grossmann presents in her carefully researched and well-organized book carry evidence of the terrible truth. But the testimony of the survivors she quotes contains the final, ineradicable facts of history.

light loss book

The raw beauty of Natalia Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity.

inward writing looks