“You feel you are in good hands from the start.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“Live in such a way that, when neighbors walk by your house months after you’re gone, they can’t help but blurt out something affectionate.”

“It’s a testament to LaBarge’s gifts as a writer that she can make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive.” @jenszalai.bsky.social

“The Weathermen’s disdain for their privilege is what made them so unnerving to the establishment. That and all the bombs.”—Dana Spiotta

In London now. Jet lagged. And this line lifts me from it. It’s the kind of moment I wait for in an @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social book review: “and one thumb drive does a lot of work.)”

“you’re not writing an essay to give a résumé of the plots. You choose to write because you think you have something fresh to say on a topic. That is, if you’re writing from choice and not just as a journeyman doing a job.”

“I read Valéry for a while. I was not the only one to be taken by Valéry—it was a phenomenon of the era. When I arrived in Paris in November of 1943 I rushed to hear Valéry’s lectures at the Collège de France. We were not many in the auditorium, and I did not know anyone.

“like Saturday night on an early Wednesday morning.”—Manny Fernandez

“one of the things that writers very quickly learn to avoid is talking their work away. Talking about your work hardens it prematurely, and weakens the charge. You need to keep a fluid sense of the work in hand—it has to be able to change almost without your being aware that it’s changing.”

From John McPhee, kind, generous man: “In the nineteen-eighties, Pepper developed Alzheimer’s disease, the synecdoche in those days for all forms of dementia. As a physician, he had followed the disease to its conclusion and could time his expectations.

“It has the practiced Perrotta polish; an easy shrug about how it will be received or remembered.” @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social

“I do like to write dialogue, intense forms of which I admire in Henry Green's novels, for instance, or in Ivy Compton-Burnett's: it's a matter of developing the ear.”

A new instalment of INVENTORY is available now via the @backlisted.bsky.social Patreon. This week: Faith by the Cure, the soundtrack to my quinquage rampage. www.patreon.com/backlisted

“Lots of writers have to have whole days or nights to get ready to write; they like to be by a fire, with absolute quiet, with their slippers on and a pipe or something, and then they’re ready to go.

“‘See You on the Other Side’ is a landslide of unironic conspicuous consumption. You can almost hear the beep of bar code scanners as characters move into rooms . . .” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“The family assigns unfair roles, and never forgives the one who does not fulfill them.”

“Like a warm summer night or a third cocktail, Lemann lulls and envelops you.” @brandyjensen.bsky.social

“‘The Oyster Diaries’ is remorseful and melancholy, and it leaves a wide wake. . . . It’s an epic of disgruntlement that’s in touch with life’s little moments of grace.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

"Please, Jim," she said. "Please. They'll hear us." “Who'll hear us? Emma can't hear us." "The radio." "Oh, I'm sick!" he shouted. "I'm sick to death of your apprehensiveness. The radio can't hear us. Nobody can hear us. And what if they can hear us? Who cares?"

“Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple—or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren’t.”

“Did laboratory studies affect my poetry? I am sure they did. . . . Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying, liberate—at least have some bearing on—the imagination, it seems to me.”

“You’re looking for some one person out there somewhere who will one day hear your voice and suddenly write back.”

“I think in fictional terms—memory transmuted by observation and experience.”

“like a powerlifter hoisting a Magic 8 Ball . . .” @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social

“Here is the land of blur.”—Anthony Lane

'How many times must I tell you I don’t want to make more money?’

“There is always a sheen to his writing. The sentences cut a swift, clean trail across the page—a mackerel through the water.”—David Remnick

“Although I can’t claim to recall the performances in detail—I was between ten and twelve—their echoes have never left my mind.”—Alex Ross

“You’ll finish his secret history five pounds heavier but a little happier.” @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social

“Mann might have argued that there is not only a moral but also an artistic virtue in being outwardly boring and banal. It is a hedge against mania. . . . Every pilgrimage is suspect . . .”—Alex Ross

“the peculiar effect of putting 21st-century manners into the head of a 1960s segregationist.”

“at the core of the memoir is the persistent hum of a simple truth.” @jenszalai.bsky.social

‘10 February ‘The party I would have liked to attend is my own funeral. I’d like to know who came and what they said, who wept and who didn’t, and how long it took for friends to get over it.’

“Sams is alive at her typewriter.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“Prose is only as good as its approximation of the condition of poetry—that condition in which not a rhythm, not a particle of sound can be changed without upsetting the entire page.”

“Then all of us said ‘Salud!’ as many times as could be for six of them and three of us, and then they filed out of the café, the six of them, tired and dusty and little, as men of a mighty horde are little.”

From the obituary by Alden Whitman, a quote from Edmund Wilson: “‘she has put into what she has written a voice, a state of mind, an era, a few moments of human experience that nobody else has conveyed.’”

“by almost any measure, 2026 is a goat rodeo.”—Jill Lepore

“Underneath all the moralizing is a relentless push to make intimacy subject to state power . . .” @jenszalai.bsky.social

Stephen Grosz, from the article by Daphne Merkin: ‘For many people, what we know best is suffering. Our suffering. And people stay there.

“I’m almost invariably stuck after one page or one paragraph—at which point I have to begin thinking about what the story could possibly be about. I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.”

“The album’s concern is one that has shaped my own life and the lives of many people I know: when the world is increasingly inhospitable, is isolating oneself that irrational of a response?”—Hanif Abdurraqib

“maybe the idiosyncratic lives of these peregrinating writers invite a . . . proposal: Read this book and be enthralled.” @jenszalai.bsky.social

“My new best friend Chazzy . . .” @danbarry58.bsky.social

‘Freud can be criticized for all sorts of things. But his genius was to make something out of a failure.’ Jonathan Lear on Freud, failure and speaking truthfully. granta.com/we-are-creat...

“I trusted my motives in taking possession of a piece of material I genuinely considered my own. After all, the book wasn’t about Mama, it was about me coming to maturity.”

“A couple of times, Roger took both my hands in his and looked me in the eye—an earnest, uncharacteristic gesture that startled me and brought me to attention—and said he was so, so, so sorry that Andy was old, too.”—Margaret Moorman

‘I questioned all that I’ve learned in life, multiple times this week . . . I questioned it all. And then I left those questions behind, and stepped into the arena anyway.’

“Groff is spilling so much salt right now, Morton should give her a jingle.” @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social

“I began seeing my memories with the wisdom of adult hindsight . . .”