Blog

Tag: literature

  • September 30th, 2012 2:52pm

    Well, the idea of a single protagonist, I never could understand too well. What I’ve felt is that problems are multi-personal, they involve us all, there’s no such thing as a private problem…it’s only a form of ignorance. When I wake up in the morning, and I fall over the chair and break my nose, and I’m broke, and my wife’s left me – it’s my ignorance that makes me thing I’m an entire universe and that these miseries are my own and they’re not affecting the rest of the world. If I could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody getting up and, in some analogous way, falling over a chair and breaking something..

    — Philip K. Dick

  • September 30th, 2012 2:16am

    Now, I don’t know how deeply to go into this, in this letter. The intuitive – I might say, gestating method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once…Mozart operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long enough, he did so; if not, then not. In other words, according to me (but not according to you people) my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness. If I believed that the first jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it takes about 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.

    — Philip K. Dick (in a letter to Eleanor Dimoff about his view on writing. Taken from Paul Williams’ introduction to “Confessions of a Crap Artist”)

  • September 23rd, 2012 2:19pm

    He was sorry for her, but he no longer felt any affection for the girl who had been a wonderful part of his life for some time. Just as he had always shut his heart to other women who had betrayed him in the past, Bond forced Helena out of his life then and there.

    As he took out a cigarette and lit it, Bond wondered what was colder – the cruel realm of espionage that had victimized and ultimately destroyed Helena Marksbury, the icy summit of Kangchenjunga, or his own hardened heart.

    — James Bond: High Time To Kill by Raymond Benson

  • September 23rd, 2012 1:52pm


    mynameisbondjamesbond:

    To celebrate the 100th year anniversary of the birth of Ian Flemming, publishing powerhourse Penguin recently commissioned the very talented British born, San Francisco painter Michael Gillette to paint iconic covers of 14 James Bond novels. Amazing work. His sexy interpretation of the infamous Bond girls, with a striking minimal colour palette overlayed with interlocking 60′s inspire type treatments are so good they’re sure to bounce off the shelf.

    Penguin: Covering Bond (May 08, 2008)

  • September 18th, 2012 6:45pm

    It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all of the living and the dead.

    — James Joyce – “The Dead” Dubliners.