Douglas A. Martin famous quotes

I'm writing as I'm reading. I'm constantly already engaged in dialogue with the critics. None of these are my ideas solely. They are my form of entering into a dialogue with ideas that are already out there, and calibrating how much sense these make to me or not. I want to be responsible to the work that has already been done.
-- Douglas A. Martin

#Reading #Writing #Done

I say sometimes that I'm a poet but I work in the novel form. That's what I do. That's what makes sense to me. I think of myself as someone who makes particular interventions into genres that already exist.
-- Douglas A. Martin

#Thinking #Sometimes #Poet

I can start with the idea of taking until you can take off, through the idea that all of my writing foregrounds the idea of how I'm taking from my own life. I'm stealing from my own life in a way, and from the people around me, but in service of getting somewhere else. I'm starting with an autobiographical impulse, to get a better vantage on the circumstances of the life that I happen to be in at the moment and how that life connects to others.
-- Douglas A. Martin

#Writing #People #Moments

William Faulkner was the master of what one must do to be serious. But I don't understand why people haven't moved forward from that, why that's not where the line in the sand is that you would see from. When I think about the reception of my own writing and what seems "difficult," there is an actual precedent.
-- Douglas A. Martin

#Writing #Thinking #People

As a gay writer and someone who began by writing autobiographical fiction, it's hard to get away from chatter of "You're just a narcissist," "You're just a gay man," "You're just looking for yourself in somebody else," "Why does your boyfriend look like you," a kind of baggage that you already have to create in the face of.
-- Douglas A. Martin

#Writing #Gay #Men

If you're reading a book that I've written in the first person, without named characters, you will periodically perhaps as a reader remind yourself: Well, this is or isn't the author. This is a character.I think the second person turns that dynamic onto you, or situates it within you: This isn't really me, but what aspect of the character is really me? That creates a loop of seduction.
-- Douglas A. Martin

#Book #Reading #Character

I think Stephen Crane too becomes trapped in a myth that poetry should be operating at a certain level, that there's the real world and the reflection of that real world. I don't exist in any of these historical periods. I exist in the period in which I'm writing the book. So I only attempt to frame this in a way that I myself relate to.
-- Douglas A. Martin

#Real #Book #Writing

I'm always writing a new book even when books are being shopped around, and none of my books has been published in the order that they have been written.
-- Douglas A. Martin

#Book #Writing

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.

I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

But it's true, when you see some television, you carry it with you. It's like 90210. Tell me what young shows were being done then... We were thrilled about the ratings around the world.

But I've been there and done that. I'm not trying to prove anything to anybody, and if somebody wants me to come, if they can afford what I ask, it's not as much as Madonna makes; not that I want what Madonna makes, but I was saying.

THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 1894... I met with the Quorum and Presidency in the temple... President Woodruff then spoke... 'In searching out my genealogy I found about four hundred of my female kindred who were never married. I asked Pres. Young what I should do with them. He said for me to have them sealed to me unless there were more than 999 of them. The doctrine startled me, but I had it done.

The single most powerful element of youth is that you don't have the life experiences to know what can't be done.

I love movie-making. I'm interested in writing and directing, and I've dabbled, but I haven't done anything I care to brag about. Yet.