Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Carroll

A quiet confession of creative triage: Carroll frames his reading slowdown not as decline, but as a strategic clearing of mental space. For a working novelist, “I read less of everything now” lands like an admission against the standard writerly religion that you must constantly ingest other people’s sentences. He’s puncturing that piety without announcing a manifesto.

The subtext is anxiety and self-protection dressed up as calm curiosity. “With only fond memories of others’ work” suggests a deliberate decision to let influence blur into atmosphere. Memories are safer than fresh pages; they can inspire without crowding the room. By keeping other writers at a distance, he’s protecting his own voice from the invasive clarity of comparison: the cruel immediacy of realizing someone else solved the problem you’re currently failing to solve.

Then comes the pivot: “it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now.” The phrasing is almost comically modest, as if turning inward were a casual experiment rather than a major shift in orientation. “Interesting” is a writer’s polite mask for something more charged: necessity, longing, maybe fear. Journaling is positioned as both refuge and laboratory, a space where the stakes are lower than publication but the raw material is closer to the bone.

Context matters: Carroll’s work often lives in the porous boundary between the ordinary and the uncanny. This quote hints at a late-career impulse to source the strange from lived interiority rather than the echo chamber of contemporary literature. It’s not anti-reading; it’s pro-silence, pro-drift, the kind that lets your own preoccupations finally get loud enough to write down.