Charles Baudelaire’s copy of the French 1st edition of Les Fleurs du Mal turned to the poem Spleen

Happiness

susanna wurz

call me boring and vanilla but i lov… romantic relationships built on friendships

The novelist writes from inside. I’m rather sensitive on this point, because I write science fiction, or fantasy, or about imaginary countries, mostly—stuff that, by definition, involves times, places, events that I could not possibly experience in my own life. So when I was young and would submit one of these things about space voyages to Orion or dragons or something, I was told, at extremely regular intervals, “You should try to write about things you know about.” And I would say, But I do; I know about Orion, and dragons, and imaginary countries. Who do you think knows about my own imaginary countries, if I don’t? But they didn’t listen, because they don’t understand, they have it all backward. They think an artist is like a roll of photographic film, you expose it and develop it and there is a reproduction of Reality in two dimensions. But that’s all wrong, and if any artist tells you, “I am a camera,” or “I am a mirror,” distrust them instantly, they’re fooling you, pulling a fast one. Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside. OK, how do you go about getting at that truth? You want to tell the truth. You want to be a writer. So what do you do? You write.

--Ursula Le Guin, from the "On How To Become A Writer" at LitHub, from The Language of the Night (via @neil-gaiman)

“He drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, At Your Age (via loveage-moondream)

(via ce88186f598c5612cf80a5c6f7413727.jpg (564×705))

-The dreamer-

lise froissart