Quote

When I write after dark, observed Cyril Connolly, the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose

Anne Fadiman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Fadiman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 7
Author
Essayist
Journalist
New York City
New York
Purple
Shade
Prose
Evening
Dark
Write
Scatter
Writing
Shades
Observed

More quotes by Anne Fadiman

Image
If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
Anne Fadiman
Image
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
Anne Fadiman
Image
...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
Anne Fadiman
Image
Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
Anne Fadiman
Image
The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
Anne Fadiman
Image
I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.
Anne Fadiman
Image
E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
Anne Fadiman
Image
I am very grateful to the electronic world for making my life easier, but there is something about holding a book - the smell and the world of association. Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love.
Anne Fadiman
Image
I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.
Anne Fadiman
Image
It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
Anne Fadiman
Image
If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.
Anne Fadiman
Image
It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.
Anne Fadiman
Image
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
Anne Fadiman
Image
Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
Anne Fadiman
Image
Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anne Fadiman
Image
A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.
Anne Fadiman
Image
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
Anne Fadiman
Image
when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says Private - grownups keep out: a children sprawled on the bed, reading.
Anne Fadiman
Image
When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.
Anne Fadiman
Image
Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
Anne Fadiman