Joanna Scott Quotes

10 quotes in 200 categories

• There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure…
• Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and…
• With prurient absorption and only minimal risk, we can pretend to be the subject of the lead article on the front page of the Style…
• In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.
• In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency.
• Masks are wonderfully paradoxical in this way: while they may hide the physical reality, they can show us how a person wants to be seen.
• When we really start searching for the truth in stories, we can find it everywhere, not just in sincere confessions but in the deliberate lies…
• How wonderful it would be to scatter words as they rise to consciousness, to let them lie where they fall.
• The best liars lie with their eyes rather than with their words. This might put writers at a disadvantage.
• Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.

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