‘What the bottom line always comes to is the old two a.m. cry: We can’t go on living like this.’
Breasting the regular swells of land, on a red dirt road as true as a line of longitude, the car was like a boat at sea. The ocean was hardly more solitary than this empty country, where in forty miles or so I hadn’t seen another vehicle. A warm westerly blew over the prairie, making waves, and wh…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘The term ‘man of letters’ now seems hopelessly archaic, but I’d like to think there’s still life left in the notion of the writer who’s just a writer.’
‘I flew to Minneapolis, rented a car and followed the river downstream for a thousand miles.’
‘Sleep has disassembled the self: it will take patience to rebuild a person out of the heap of components in the bed.’
‘To my eyes, airplane always looked impertinently casual on the page; it robbed the amazing machine of its proper mystery.’
‘There is a view of American men presented by the media – of men as boorish, insensitive, emotionally immature – that manages to underscore various stereotypes that I feel fiction and poetry have a duty to dismantle.’
