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John Baker's Blog

Reflections of a working writer and reader

For 30 years I've spent an average of 10 hours a day alone in a room, sitting at my desk. If you count only the work that is good enough to be published, my daily average is a good deal less than half a page a day. Orhan Pamuk

Latest Posts

Presque vu LXV

The BBC reports on McCain’s and Obama’s U-turns now they’re secure nominations for their respective parties. Why are politicians such ugly people?

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“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

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Gaële Chojnowicz writes about Carson McCullers:

Walter Allen said of Carson McCullers; “Faulkner apart, the most remarkable novelist the South has produced seems to me Carson McCullers.”

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The Flowering Dream

A writer’s main asset is intuition; too many facts impede intuition. A writer needs to know so many things, but there are so many things he doesn’t need to know — he needs to know human things [...]

continue reading . . . The Flowering Dream

Books talking

You let it out from time to time. Margaret Atwood, I like her. Or you tell someone you’ve just finished another Elmore Leonard novel. Rupert Thomson, I’ve read a couple of those, there’s always something . . .
Whatever, your tastes change and you get to the end of this author’s work and start on someone [...]

continue reading . . . Books talking

Must reads

Out Stealing Timber I
Looking to be understood?
A Writer’s Notebook I
(La Peste) The Plague by Albert Camus - a review
Saddest Books Revisited
The Glass Menagerie - a review
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Bhagdad Burning
Five things Feminism has done for me
Learning to Write I
Read extracts from my novels

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