Ewa Lipska's concepts

 Karel Capek, one of the most important Czech writers, once said that "Humour is the salt of life and whoever is well salted will long keep his freshness." I used my own definition of poetry on the cover of my book, which has just been published in Bulgaria, but also have some other concepts. Let me give you a few: Love – an incurable disease everybody dreams about. A writer – a musician of the word. Politics – the oldest profession in the world. God – an emergency for those who believe. Morality – the ten commandments. Beauty – replacing thinking with seeing.
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--EWA LIPSKA in an interview with Eurozine

Independent publishers vs Megapublishers

Independent publishers are not hybrids, they are instead original seeds, the matrices, the sources of cultural diversity. They bring bibliodiversity to face the humongous behemoth of megapublishing and bookselling.

--Susan Hawthorne at Publishing Perspectives

Home to Best American Writing today

 It’s no accident that much of the best American writing today is to be found not inside the covers of a book but in magazines and online journals. (A case in point: William Deresiewicz, the author of unapologetically brilliant essays in The New Republic and The Chronicle of Higher Education, is also the author of A Jane Austen Education, a good book that would be a lot better if it didn’t have “proposal” written on every page.) True, most of the writers publishing in those forums can’t make a living at it anymore, but at least their editors are committed to publishing the best of what they can find rather than most marketable or the most "concept driven"

Joan Didion still matters

Vogue has a great article on Joan Didion
The ultimate standard for great writing is not clarity or intelligence or entertainment. It’s the capacity to haunt: to get under the reader’s skin and stay there even as external circumstances change. Didion’s finest books are haunting, which is why they are still discovered, admired, and pawed-over. To read her is to understand what writing, at its most exquisitely controlled, can do.

The Point of Karl Ove Knausgaard's Writing

I once met a German journalist who compared me to a rock band. He said, the books don’t really have any focus, it’s just loose, it’s like just having some songs about drinking and they don’t have anything else. But it’s in that band photo, that image, where everything comes together. He wondered if I had a certain point in my writing, because it’s all, you know, bits and pieces and nothing. And then he saw pictures of me, he said, “You pose like a rock star, you kind of summarize everything there.” And I said, “It’s very unfair of you to say that, because…” [laughs] You know, he meant it really, really badly. It has a lot to do with other things. But what I can say is, my face is… I can’t look at myself in the mirror. If I do I see the English cover, you know, and it’s just, I’m dead. [laughs]

Related
How serious a writer is Karl Ove Knausgaard?

Literary Text vs Published Product

We must make the distinction between a literary text and a published product. I’ve always written literary texts; I’ve had different priorities. I’ve never written to make a living, but have made a living in order to be able to write. 

Writing in the First Person

The first person is the shortest of shortcuts to an elusive element of the real, a person’s unspoken life, access to which is unavailable elsewhere in art.