Michael Kurrier

“All writers want their words to have an effect. Novelists want to entertain, to reveal truth, to move, to provoke reverie. And beyond? Do they want their readers to act as a result of their words? It depends.”
― Julian Barnes, Departure

“I said that the more we can name what we're seeing, the more language we have for it, the less likely we are to destroy it. If you look at the field beside the road and you see merely the generic 'meadow,' you're less likely to care if it's bulldozed for a strip mall than you are if you know that those tall, flat-leaved spires are milkweed, upon which the monarchs have flown two thousand miles to feed, or if you can name sailor's breeches and purslane, lamb's-quarter, or the big umbels of wild carrot feeding the small multitudes. Isn't the world larger and more valuable, if you know what an umbel is?”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“This is what the writer craves, in a café in the earliest hours, in an empty drawing room of a hotel, or scrawling in notebook in the pew of a silent cathedral. A sudden shaft of brightness containing the vibration of a particular moment. . . . The unsullied memory of unpremediated gestures of kindness. These are the bread of angels.”
― Patti Smith, Bread of Angels: A Memoir

“What I am interested in is a point at which knowing how to be and knowing how to write perhaps intersect. Everyone who writes imagines it in a certain way. . .”
― Daniele Del Giudice, Lo stadio di Wimbledon