Activity

Ferrante: I publish to be read: it’s the only thing that interests me about publishing. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn. But I don’t think the reader should be indulged a…

She copied them from dresses worn by movie stars, princesses, from the models of fashion designers. But she had the gift of remaking them so that on her they seemed more charged with energy. My mother never sewed a dress for herself that didn’t make her appear an extraordinary woman. Whereas at hom…

11/3/66

In the most terrible and terrifying moments of my life (ten, perhaps, in a lifetime) Mozart, not a sedative, is the hope—though not the healing power. There is no healing power. But Mozart knew all that. I, or we, suffer here and now, and he often wrote his music during the worst. It is …

5/7/52

With these serious people, these bons vivants, who take so much more seriously their amusements, their aesthetic surroundings, than any artist takes his work or his creative process, the creative process begins to atrophy in their presence, for the curious reason that their pursuit of p…

On Clémentine’s last night we go to see a French band we both like play at a little venue near Old Street, dark with people smoking the occasional illicit cigarette, the kind of place where the owners don’t care, and everyone misses the days before the ban, when we couldn’t see each other clearly t…