Toward the end of a long run, I was tottering back to Pioneer Park with a friend, nearly there, when he urged us to stop at a used book sale on Virginia Lane. Just above Parkhill there's a sprawling house at the edge of a little pond, overfrequented by flocks of ducks, where an older fellow, a former used book shop owner, sets out fully-stocked shelves in his garage and laden tables on his gravel driveway. There didn't seem to be all that much to tempt the wallet—Tom Clancy, Nicholas Sparks, faceless bodice-rippers—but I did come across a hardback copy of  Nabokov's "Lectures on Literature" for 5 bucks—swell deal—and drove by later to pick it up. Perusing the hodgepodge, I also found IB Singer's "Collected Stories" for 6 dollars. Goes to show that at almost any book sale, there’s usually a diamond in the rough; even two, three, or a dozen or more. In general, it’s worth intermitting the day to stop and take a look, at the obvious risk of piling onto one's already excessive book freight.

On the perils of writing fiction—IB Singer, Collected Stories

In the process of creating [stories], I have become aware of the many dangers that lurk behind the writer of fiction. The worst of them are: 1. The idea that the writer must be a sociologist and a politician, adjusting himself to what are called social dialectics. 2. Greed for money and quick recognition. 3. Forced originality—namely, the illusion that pretentious rhetoric, precious innovations in style, and playing with artificial symbols can express the basic and ever-changing nature of human relations, or reflect the combinations and complications of hereditary and environment. These verbal pitfalls of so-called “experimental” writing have done damage even to genuine talent; they have destroyed much of modern poetry by making it obscure, esoteric, and charmless. Imagination is one thing, and the distortion of what Spinoza called “the order of things” is something else entirely. Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself.

Jean Cocteau on Proust: 

A giant miniature, full of mirages, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time.

Frederic Raphael on Famous Actresses I Have Known

HBO’s Olive Kitteridge is elegant, amusing and quietly (and unquietly) devastating.