Gargoyle Online

# 9

Roberta Allen
Space in the mind for whatever comes next

last words

“I think the hardest part about writing is writing.”
—Nora Ephron

“Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth.”
—Edna O’Brien

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
—Shannon Hale

“One does instinctively reserve a part of oneself as the writing self, visiting it secretly while doing all the daily things.”
—Shirley Hazzard

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of the past centuries.”
—Rene Descartes

“I would sometimes get five rejection letters in my mailbox at once. The main thing editors would write was that the characters were too hapless, and it was all too depressing.”
—Mary Gaitskill

“I do think the purpose of fiction is to reanimate our lives, reenchant ourselves, and turn us back into the irreducible complexity of the smallest, simplest day.”
—Richard Powers

“I’ve absorbed so much poetry over the years, that there are just hundreds and hundreds of lines in my mind. And when one of them floats up out of the mass, I know it’s telling me something.”
—Helen Vendler

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.”
—Jonas Mekas

“I believed stories should have a purity and not be about what was going on—and there was a lot going on, of course, in my life. My husband and I acquired a toucan, then we had a baby.”
—Joy Williams

“You can’t, of course, make any money with short stories. The first thing they’d say was ‘This is a nice story—where’s your novel?’ And I would just lie my head off. ‘Oh, it’s at home.’ ”
—Mary Robison

“I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro

“Turns out being an author is 5% writing a book and 95% coming up with interesting new ways to beg strangers online to buy the book.”
—brosandprose

“What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity.”
—William S. Burroughs

“Writing is neither a happy nor an unhappy occupation—it is something between. It is a second life.”
—Ismail Kadare

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.”
—Georgia O’Keeffe

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Anouk Aimée

John Alspaugh

Russell Atkins

Susan Backlinie

John Barbata

John Burnside

Caleb Carr

Orlando Cepeda

Joe Chambers

James Chance

Dabney Coleman

Roger Corman

Jan Cremer

Charles R. Cross

Mark Damon

Alain Delon

Sergio Donati

Phil Donohue

Jack Driscoll

Audrey Flack

Kinky Friedman

Francoise Hardy

John Hawken

Abner Haynes

Gaps Hendrickson

Darryl Hickman

Doug Ingle

Hettie Jones

Parnelli Jones

Ismail Kadare

Greg Kihn

“Spider” John Koerner

Ed Mann

Willie Mays

Jerry Miller

Sandra Milo

Peggy Moffitt

Martin Mull

Alice Munro

Bob Newhart

Jim Otto

Bernice Johnson Reagon

Gena Rowlands

Melanie Safka

David Sanborn

Irène Schweiser

David Shapiro

Maxine Singer

Donald Sutherland

Nathaniel Tarn

Happy Traum

Bill Walton

Carl Weathersby

Jerry West

Kathi Wolfe

Heather Wood

Andrea Wyatt

Gargoyle Online

# 9

Table of Contents

fiction

Poetry

nonFiction

Play

Art

Audio

Video

Special Thanks

last words

rip

Gargoyle Online

# 9

Table of Contents

fiction

Poetry

nonFiction

Play

Art

Audio

Video

Special Thanks

last words

rip

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