A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I’d much rather go and read a book.
Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage – as soon as you even attempt to engage.
There are things that can’t be said, because it’s hard to have to know them.
Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once.
And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.
It’s about the connecting force from form to form. It’s the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It’s the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.
Short stories consume you faster. They’re connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they’re also a total joy.
Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
I don’t want a tombstone. You could carve on it ‘She never actually wanted a tombstone.’
The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.
Words are like untying a corset – you can move into this great space with them.
All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language – on all its levels.
There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.
Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.
The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.