"A life-marker."

From: VQR

"The book cover for Günter Grass’s [The] Tin Drum represents everything for me that a good cover should. It’s not only a bold and beautiful design, it’s a cover that reminds me of a time and a space. A life-marker. It sat on my parents’ shelf next to Graham Greene, looking grown-up and exotic and probably a bit too clever for a little person to understand. But it looked exciting: the boldness and confidence of the illustration and type—as if the artist just picked up a brush and painted it on directly; the iconic Oskar and his vibrant red drum.
     Later, as a recent graduate working at Minerva Books in London, I helped design the paperback covers for Grass’s novels. I knew nothing about Grass at all, I hadn’t read a thing. I was given a pile of artwork—just black-and-white drawings—and was told that this was the artwork to be used. Flipping through the stack, I came across the icon of the drummer boy and was immediately transported back to my parents’ library."

— Jon Gray, The Virginia Quarterly Review
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Speed Writing

"Depressives have Prozac, worrywarts have Valium, gym rats have steroids, and overachievers have Adderall. Usually prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [...] the drug is a cocktail of amphetamines that increases alertness, concentration, and mental-processing speed and decreases fatigue. It's often called a cognitive steroid because it can make people better at whatever it is they're doing. When scientists administered amphetamines to college shot-putters, they were able to throw more than 4 percent farther. According to one recent study, as many as one in five college students have taken Adderall or its chemical cousin Ritalin as study buddies.

     The drug also has a distinguished literary pedigree. During his most productive two decades, W.H. Auden began every morning with a fix of Benzedrine, an over-the-counter amphetamine similar to Adderall that was used to treat nasal congestion. James Agee, Graham Greene, and Philip K. Dick all took the drug to increase their output.
     Before the FDA made Benzedrine prescription-only in 1959, Jack Kerouac got hopped up on it and wrote On the Road in a three-week 'kick-writing' session. 'Amphetamines gave me a quickness of thought and writing that was at least three times my normal rhythm,' another devotee, John-Paul Sartre, once remarked."
— Joshua Foer, Slate
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Nobel Prize Winner, 1961 - Ivo Andrić

"J. R. R. Tolkien may have won over millions of devoted fans across the globe with The Lord of the Rings, but to a small committee in Sweden known as the Nobel prize jury, his epic tale of Middle Earth just wasn't up to scratch.
     Newly declassified documents showing the inner workings of the world's most prestigious literary prize have revealed that, 50 years ago, Tolkien was rejected because The Lord Of The Rings had 'not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality'.
     Nominated by his friend C S Lewis - author of The Chronicles Of Narnia - in 1961, Tolkien was swiftly dismissed by the committee along with other lauded figures such as Graham Greene and EM Forster as they awarded that year's prize to Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić instead."
— Huffington Post
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"At the beginning of the book [The Bridge on the Drina] Andrić focuses on a small Serbian boy taken from his mother as part of the levy of Christian subjects of the Sultan (devshirme). Andrić describes how the mothers of these children follow their sons wailing, until they reach a river where the children are taken across by ferry and the mothers can no longer follow. That child becomes a Muslim and, taking a Turkish name (Mehmed, later Mehmed pasha Sokolović), is promoted quickly and around the age of 60 becomes Grand Vizier. Yet, that moment of separation still haunts him and he decides to order the building of a bridge at a point on the river where he was parted from his mother."
— Wikipedia
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Get books by all the authors mentioned in this article here...

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." — Thomas Mann

Illustration: Michael Hale

"[...] what's the best time of day to write? and its corollary: how many hours are necessary?
     Some writers (Dickens among them) are larks. Others – more nocturnal – are owls. Robert Frost, whose remote Vermont cabin I visited recently in company with his biographer Jay Parini, never started work till the afternoon, and often stayed up till two or three in the morning, not rising until midday, or even later. Proust, famously, worked night and day in a cork-lined room. I remember reading somewhere that Raymond Chandler observed that it was impossible to write well for more than four hours a day. What do you do in the afternoon?
     There's also the question of how long it might take to complete a novel. Here, you encounter literary legends. Faulkner claimed to have completed As I Lay Dying in six weeks. In the mid-1930s, PG Wodehouse, who wrote fast once he had the mechanics of his plots straight, polished off the last 10,000 words of Very Good, Jeeves! in a single day. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene describes writing Stamboul Train on benzedrine, to pay the bills, working against the clock. Further back, Samuel Johnson wrote Rasselas, which is short, in a fortnight to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. Or so it's said.
     More usually, a 60-70,000 word novel seems to take at least a year to complete, allowing for two or three drafts, although often the first, rough outline can get written in a matter of weeks. The strange truth about a lot of fiction is that the dominant moments that animate an entire novel can occur to the writer in a matter of minutes. After that, in the words of one New Zealand writer I recall with affection, 'it's just typing.' " — Robert McCrum, Guardian
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