Philippa on Day Four – some kernels (and emotional truths)

I woke at 4am with my head full of voices.  Here are some of the louder ones:

“It is always the changes you don’t want, that change everything” Junot Diaz

 

“”Landscape goes into the making of us” Sarah Laing

 

“Never read your own writing.  It’s an exercise in self loathing” Steve Braunias

 

“”Ordinary things, through the agency of time, become treasures”  Iain Sharpe

 

“”The most important moment in any dialogue is when people stop [talking]” John Burnside

 

“I use it like prozac.  It calms and charms and gives you ideas. ” Shonagh Koea on reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time

 

“Where you come from is not who you are” Kapka Kassabova

 

“We have to explore the blackness.  Humour is a way of going there and NOT drowning”. Tusiata Avia

 

“A novel is a problem….a series of issues.  It’s like a marriage.  [When writing one] You are married to your fucking novel”  Anne Enright

 

“A good ending (the last line) is like a pebble dropped into a pool – the reverberations come afterwards”  Anne Enright

 

“Readers of biography are greedy readers.  They have an insatiable appetite for detail.” Hermione Lee

 

“Fiction will deal with what’s in your soul”  John Burnside

 

“I hear silences.  I see empty spaces.  Cities I find too distracting – there is too much noise – too many characters.”  Sarah Laing

 

“A negative hallucination is when you refuse to see what is right in front of you.” Junot Diaz

 

“When delving into history, your own, the major protagonist you have to forgive is yourself” John Burnside.

 

This sure is one NOISY hotel (yawn).