One of the things that I do instead of driving fast cars and dating supermodels is collect interesting quotes. This is, perhaps, a sign of a larger psychosis, but any time that I run across an interesting string of words in a book, or a movie, or an advertisement, or a website, or a conversation with a homeless person, I go and write them down in a tiny little notepad .txt file that gets copied over to every computer that I've ever owned, like an immortal sorcerer putting his soul into a new host every millennia. Anyways, I thought you might like to see some of them! There is no particular rhyme or reason to them, other than that they grabbed my attention in some way, but I like to think that surrounding myself with these things has improved my own writing. Without further ado, here's a dozen interesting quotes given in the order that I wrote them down an unknown number of years ago: "Godzilla is the son of the atomic bomb. He is a nightmare...
A quick followup to my previous post about Russel Hoban's The Hungry Three series! A friend of mine who happens to be both a professor of poetry and also a poet herself pointed out that the opening of The Great Gumdrop Robbery also happens to be poetry. Quoth the poet: "Your analysis of the paragraph noting the repetition/patterns and fairytale conventions is spot on, but the meter is a significant factor as well, contributing to the paragraph's incantation-like quality." She suggested looking at the following stanzas of Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as "examples of comparable meter": Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I mu...