The Joys of Deadlines

By Cornelia Read

What my deadline looks like, from the laptop's point of view:


“A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.”

--Rita Mae Brown

A deadline’s an unnerving thing.

--Marchette Chute

"Somebody was using the pencil."

--Dorothy Parker, On why she missed a New Yorker
deadline, from James Thurber's The Years with Ross

"Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened."

--George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,”

"Without religion we will have only novels."

--Friedrich Von Schlegel (1772–1829), German philosopher

"Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room."

--Annie Dillard

"An accurate charting of the American woman’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time—but like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal. . . . Each time, the spiral turns her back just short of the finish line."

--Susan Faludi

"One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed."

--Oscar Wilde

"Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top."

--Italo Calvino

"Novels are longer than life."

--Natalie Clifford Barney

"Get a girl in trouble, then get her out again."

-- Kathleen Norris, Describing her formula for eighty-one
“relentlessly wholesome” novels, Time 28 January, 1966

"I am devoted to detective novels. They make such a nice change from my work."

--Richard Leofric Jackson, the President of Interpol