Darcy

“If you dig into Orwell’s work, you find a lot of sentences about flowers and pleasures and the natural world. If you read enough of those sentences the gray portrait turns to color, and if you look for these passages, even his last masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, changes complexion. These sentences are less ringing, less prophetic than the political analysis, but they are not unrelated to it, and they have their own poetics, their own power, and their own politics. Nature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it, though this was not much recognized in his era.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“Unlike most people I don’t fear death, as I get older I rediscover my long-forgotten youth, and once in a while, when the going gets tough, I bury myself comfortably in my work. My books already guarantee me a form of immortality.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Interventions 2020

“do want to write a good story. But I no longer trust the judgements of my age. The critic now assesses the writer’s life as much as her work. The judges award prizes according to a checklist of criteria created by corporations and bureaucrats. And we writers and artists acquiesce, fearful of a word that might be misconstrued or an image that might cause offence. I read many of the books nominated for the globalised book prizes; so many of them priggish and scolding, or contrite and chastened. I feel the same way about those films feted at global festivals and award ceremonies. It’s not even that it is dead art: it’s worse, it’s safe art. Most of them don’t even have the dignity of real decay and desiccation: like the puritan elect, they want to take their piety into the next world. Their books and their films don’t even have the power to raise a good stench. The safe is always antiseptic.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, Seven and a Half

“Vincent’s reading would eventually range far beyond the books approved by his parents. But these early exposures set the trajectory. He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died. He would start with one book by an author and then devour the entire oeuvre in a few weeks.”
― Steven Naifeh, Van Gogh: The Life