Unit 4: Selection Vocabulary 5

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.

I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers.

We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.

We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit.

Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this...

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.

During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.

I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car...

It was precisely this moment in Las Vegas that made Play It as It Lays begin to tell itself to me, but the moment appears in the novel only obliquely, in a chapter which begins...

The picture that did, the picture that shimmered and made these other images coalesce, was the Panama airport at 6 A.M.