I don’t call myself a very good Christian, but I think I know one when I see one, and I also think I know when I don’t. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hour or so of banjo music in an imitative John Fahey style. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
Since the 1960s, exile for Haitians is a condition that ends only to begin again. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
To me, there is nothing more soothing than the song of a mosquito that can’t get through the mesh to bite you. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
I have always had a mystical attitude toward inspiration. That’s my nature. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
Normally, most writers don’t say, ‘I’m going into a mild hypnotic trance.’ Typically, they don’t know how they do it. Most people, when they have a good experience writing, they’re well placed in that state, which is also sometimes called a ‘flow state.’ If you don’t have trouble, you don’t have to think about it. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it’s smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
Hemingway’s minimalism is based on the psychological mechanics of repression. An echo of his approach can be detected in a favorite trope of 1980s minimalists: a pattern of reference to dire secrets and hidden wounds these authors didn’t realize they were supposed to have imagined. Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
In ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ Hemingway cozies up to revolution by romanticizing it (and not only with those execrable love scenes). Madison Smartt Bell Read Quote
