From Lanier Smith, who weaves enchantment wherever he goes… In the movies murder is clean and easy. They never show the scum and the blood. But when it happens in tensile town it’s about a cheap and dirty as it gets. There are many sins in Hollywood, dirty little sins.…
Category: Writing
INTERVIEWER What did you first write? CAPOTE Short stories. And my more unswerving ambitions still revolve around this form. When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my…
INTERVIEWER What about the novel you’re writing while you’re here—have you been working on it a long time? …Is it unfair to ask you what it will be about? McCARTHY No, it’s very easy. It’s called The Group, and it’s about eight Vassar girls. It starts with the inauguration of…
INTERVIEWER I gather from what you said earlier that you don’t find the act of writing difficult. WAUGH I don’t find it easy. You see, there are always words going round in my head: Some people think in pictures, some in ideas. I think entirely in words. By the time…
Subtly subversive in his fiction — less so in his left-wing political writing — he consistently upended expectations with a cocktail of fiction and fact, remixed in book after book; with clever and substantive manipulations of popular genres like the Western and the detective story; and with his myriad…
“Billy Dear, please dress me forever. I love you, Marilyn.” Note from Marilyn Monroe to costume designer, William Travilla: On “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”: .
Live all you can—it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had? Deep experience is never peaceful. Henry James …so I educated myself. I just got on with…
Read any good Hollywood tell-alls lately? What book, in your opinion, really gets Hollywood right? Most of them are too soft and too phony. But one great, real Hollywood read is Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust.” There is also an amazing book by William Goldman called “Adventures in…
I felt that some sort of scene was necessary in order to celebrate my first entrance into America, so I said “Little lamb, who made thee?” to a customs official. A fracas ensued far exceeding my wildest dreams, during which he delved down—with malice aforethought—to the bottom of…