Why Don't You Write Something I Might Read?

The birth of the reader, wrote Roland Barthes, must be ransomed by the death of the writer. That is the only time you will see that name in this book.

Every author I have read is a character in my life story, every book a milestone.

Taste is developed through these same routes. The keyword here is 'developed'. Taste is not something one is born with, it is acquired, like a taste for good wine or for a specific type of art or music.

When we read, we sieve the writer's experiences through our own, and the chances of two people having the exact same experiences and responses are virtually zero.

Unread books are much more valuable than read ones,' explained Nassim Taleb, using Eco's library as an example in The Black Swan. He called the unread books the 'antilibrary.

As Taleb says, 'The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books."

Just because it comes easily to you, don't think it is not important.'

My views are not exhaustive. I throw hooks into a subject and write about whatever comes up with them.'

Constant labour is the law of art as well as the law of life, for art is the creative activity of the mind. And so great artists, true poets do not wait for either commissions or clients; they create today, tomorrow, ceaselessly.

He has followed no other profession. It is a statement that both challenges and acknowledges arrogance. I may not be good enough for anything else, it says, but I am the best at what I do.

Mehta is both creative storyteller and roving reporter, recording impressions with a precision and feel for the language that is unforced, almost casual, but is in fact the result of many rewrites and rigorous self-editing. He is known to redo a piece 150 times till he gets it right.

"In retrospect everything looks inevitable.'

My whole life is an unprecedented-and so, for the time being, incomprehensible-experiment, conducted by me in the guise of a mad scientist.

Harry S. Truman said: 'You can accomplish anything in life provided you don't mind who gets the credit.'

In his study of alcohol and the American writer, The Thirsty Muse, Tom Dardis gives a list of alcoholic writers-Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, Tennessee Williams, James Jones, John Cheever, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver-and concludes, 'Alcoholism seems to be the American writer's disease'. The careers of Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Neill show that far from aiding creativity, alcohol ended careers prematurely.

Goodwin makes the following argument: Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires selfconfidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes.

Hemingway and Berryman committed suicide (like their respective fathers had), Carver died of cancer at fifty, Fitzgerald of a heart attack at fortyfour.

The rehabilitated O'Neill once wrote in a letter, "I don't think anything worth reading was ever written by anyone who was drunk when he wrote it.'

'Some writers aim to move their readers,' wrote Higashino, 'others want to write beautiful sentences. I want readers to be continually surprised by my ideas.' In actual fact, he does all three.

At some point, after early years of reading a book through before taking on another one, I got into the habit of reading many books simultaneously. In every room of the house, there are books lying around half-read, almost-read, unlikely-to-be-read-in-the-near-future. Psychologists might see all sorts of connections between a former chain-smoker continuing as a chain-reader.

For long at least in my mind-there was something reprehensible about incomplete reading. I imagined it reflected a character flaw; the terrible habit of leaving things undone.

You didn't understand a line of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, yet you soldiered through. It was the attitude that made Hawking's book the greatest unread book of all time.

If I am locked up, I am more likely to write a boring book than read one.

For writing on sex to be gripping, it must suggest rather than draw pictures, for the human imagination is powerful, and feels cheated when it is brought down to earth.

Clay tablets of the ancient Sumerians have complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.

To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures.'

Pinker belongs to that class of scientists who write (or should that be 'writes'-the book tells us) exceedingly well. It is a class that includes the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Brian Greene, who speak directly to the reader without the need to sieve their prose through jargon and mumbo-jumbo.

Lynn Truss, for example, says that people who misuse apostrophes 'deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave'.

There are in fact two things,' wrote Hippocrates, 'science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Why do clever people believe stupid things, asks Ben Goldacre in Bad Science. Simon Singh, Ernst, Goldacre are among the wellknown debunkers of medical nonsense that seems only too wellentrenched in our world.

The secret of its success was a direct result of my ignorance... I had to struggle to understand what I wrote, and this helped me write in ways that others could understand.'

'I wrote a book on relativity mainly to teach myself the theory,'

Gardner begins perhaps the most philosophical of his books with a simple question-'Why does a mirror reverse only the left and right but not up and down?'

Emerson said a man is known by the books he reads.

Emerson said a man is known by the books he reads. Equally, I think, a man is known by the books he writes.

In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel makes the point that reading precedes writing.

In 2014, he wrote a poem beginning, 'Your death, near now, is of an easy sort'. It is about a Japanese maple his daughter had planted in his garden and about wondering whether he would live to see the leaves flame red. 'I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I am about to die, and I don't,' he told an interviewer later.

The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.'

'that a lust for anonymity is a better guarantee of seeing the world as it is.'

Czapski could recall whole passages and relate the novel to the prisoners' current situation. 'After a certain length of time,' he wrote, 'facts and details emerge on the surface of our consciousness which we had not the slightest idea were filed away somewhere in our brains.

Death is a subtext to the lectures, as indeed it was to the existence of the listeners.

Czapski brought to his talks a casual, chatty tone that only someone truly obsessed can.

The man who was among the few to have revolutionised his field, once described by Richard Dawkins as 'a latter-day Marco Polo, journeying the Silk Road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind,' remains a fun-loving, mischievous boy with a booming laugh and a wicked sense of humour.

The British scientist J.B.S. Haldane once wrote that the world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.

We are currently working on synesthesia, which for years was considered a mere curiosity,' he explains. 'Here a patient literally "tastes" a shape or sees colour in sound or in a number. Poets and artists who deal in metaphors are prone to synesthesia.

The condition was first written about by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in 1880. But, says Ramachandran, it was seen as an oddity. 'It was like explaining a mystery in terms of an enigma,' he points out.

it is better to pursue ten outlandish ideas than play safe with the commonplace.

synesthesia occurs in the earliest stages of perceptionbefore the brain stamps meaning on what the eye reports.

The theory also seems to explain the origin of language. 'Language could have evolved,' says Ramachandran, 'through a sensory-to-motor synthesis. Sensory-to-motor is not difficult to understand. Think of dancing. Here, our movements (motor rhythm) mimic the sound and visual rhythms.'

'Secondly, when you watch someone doing something (or starting to), the corresponding mirror neuron fires in your brain, allowing you to read the other's intentions.

Ramachandran performs a unique feat of contortionism: his head is in the clouds but his feet are firmly on earth.

'Amplifying a specific rule and eliminating irrelevant detail makes a work look attractive,' explains Ramachandran.

Ethologists have known for some time about seagull behaviour. The young ones follow the mother's beak which has a red spot on it. From here it gets regurgitated food. If a beak is painted onto a long stick, the chicks follow that too, having eliminated the unnecessary detail. If then a stick with three dots is held up, the chicks get highly excited.

Talking to Ramachandran is like viewing a kaleidoscope the contours of the conversation change rapidly, shifting from the Gita to Shakespeare to Newton to Van Gogh to his botany teacher in Vaishnav college and his friend Francis Crick.

If a Martian landed on earth, it is likely that sport will confuse him more than any other human activity.

John Updike drew up the following rules when he set out as a critic: a) try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt; b) give enough direct quotation so the reader can form his own impression; c) confirm your description of the book with a quotation from the book rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis; d) go easy on the plot summary and do not give away the end; e) try to understand failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

Tolstoy wrote to a critic thus on Anna Karenina: 'Your judgment... is true, but not all of it.... What you have expressed does not express all that I meant.... It is one of the true things that can be said. If I wanted to express in words all that I meant to express by the novel, then I should have to write the same novel as I have written all over again.'

Martin Amis once pointed out that art critics, when they review art shows, don't paint pictures about those shows, film critics don't review movies by making movies about them. 'But,'

One reason a book reads differently to us at different times of our lives is the manner in which each reading places on it another level of meaning, another set of experiences through which we see it.

The spirit of Premier lives on in Bengaluru. Blossom Book House's Mayi Gowda and The Bookworm's Krishna Gowda are genial, knowledgeable men who gave up the professions they were trained for (engineering and management, respectively) to sell books.

Virginia Woolf best captured the creative madness in such a store: 'Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.'

More lasting friendships are made in a bookshop than in a bar. For all are equal in the presence of books. Also, as someone said, you can always find what you are looking for online. But it takes a bookstore to find what you were not looking for. This is something Mayi Gowda is keenly aware of. Blossom is the establishment that changed the texture of Church Street.

It showed more than a talent for gathering quotations and anecdotes; what it revealed was the confidence to let other people light your path while you had your say.

The Japanese art form of kingtsugi repairs broken and flawed pottery with gold, silver or platinum. It doesn't hide the cracks, but embraces them, seeing them as integral to the object's history, and rebuilds something new.

With the publication of A Short History of Nearly Everything, a third type entered the fraternity: the popular writer in another field. Bill Bryson's book made a splash when it appeared, for making concepts accessible to the reader without a background in science. Bryson confessed he had less than the intelligent man's working knowledge of science, and so he set out to educate himself. He passes on the knowledge to those who have neither the time to meet, nor the access to, top scientists who answer his questions. The information gathered through a close reading of texts and sharp questioning of scientists is sieved through the clarity of his prose.

As the poet Houseman said, 'Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.'

Some of us need to dismantle the toy car to see what makes it run. Others are happy to enjoy the run.

Here's the novelist Don DeLillo: 'It's a state of automatic writing, and it represents the paradox that's at the centre of a writer's consciousness. First you look for discipline and control.

Technique is vital. As Brearley says, with good technique you can forget technique.

The philosopher David Papineau pointed out in Knowing the Score that there is little time for conscious decisions in batting.

Albert Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with 'There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

'Of all the enemies of literature,' says Connolly, 'success is the most insidious.' 'Success,' says Trollope, 'is a poison that should only be taken late in life and then only in small doses.' Failure too is a poison, as Connolly concedes, but then adds, 'Where a choice is offered, prefer the alkaline.'

novelist A.L. Kennedy. 'I can say very firmly,' she wrote, 'that in my experience, suffering is largely of no bloody use to anyone, and definitely not a prerequisite for creation. If an artist has managed to take something appalling and make it into art, that's because the artist is an artist, not because something appalling is naturally art.'

As Ross says, 'Literary genius more often arises from disappointment and chagrin than comfort and complacency; the rich and content have no need of imagination.

Nadeem is the quintessential writer from Pakistan-reacting to the mess in the country of his birth with the tools provided by the country he lives in. My work has both beauty and terror, he explained. I want to show the ugliness without extinguishing the reader's ability to love.

That second book was important for a man who had determined to be a writer, no matter what. And as often with such decisions, he made sure he had no plan B. He dropped out of university before graduating, saying he didn't want a safety net. Later, he said that in the eleven years it took him to write his novel, if he had a fallback position, he might have been tempted to fall back and the book would not have been written.

The seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said that all the troubles of humanity came about because of the difficulty men had in simply being happy to sit alone in their rooms.