Celine Nguyen

"The San Francisco Public Library was just full of really really good books. And oh, the other thing about a lot of public libraries is that you can request the books that they don't have."

"I was like, text very, very cheap. I can just download a bunch of Kindle books and spend my train commute that way."

"I remember in undergrad being I think going on the Met Museum website where they have a lot of the Met Museum like publications from the Costume Institute that are researching fashion designers and their early histories and you can download PDFs"

"I write on Substack and write long posts. I wrote this newsletter last year and I was surprised it went viral."

"So now I journal most days three pages longhand. It's like the Julia Cameron prescribed length in The Artist's Way."

"I was using Illustrator to try to copy book covers. The elements on the canvas were no longer disparate lonely things. They felt coherent and that coherence felt natural and inevitable."

"Agnes Callard who has this book called Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming which was incredibly motivating to me. It was actually the reason I quit my job to go to grad school. It has had a huge influence in my life."

"C. Thi Nguyen who you've talked to. I love him as a philosopher. He has this amazing book called Games: Agency as Art."

"Oliver Burkeman's 4000 Weeks, which I think was also a huge influence on me. I would say Oliver Burkeman is one of those great very philosophically inflected self-help writers. He's definitely at the top of that genre."

"Ellen Lupton and her partner Abbott Miller wrote this book ages ago called Design, Writing, Research. I was recently thinking about it. I was like, maybe this is the book that's just defined my life over the past decade. I'm so obsessed with that book."

"Vivian Gornick. She has this amazing book The Situation and the Story which I've actually not finished reading because every time I read a little bit I'm like wow this is so wise and profound."

"I think fanfiction, which I have a deep love for, it's like people read this work that inspires them so much. They feel so moved by it that they're just like, I have to write about this."

"People are not going to ask for Spotify or ask for BandCamp necessarily in exactly that definition."

"People are not going to ask for Spotify or ask for BandCamp necessarily in exactly that definition. You could not go online and be like who's posted something new on BandCamp."

"I read Maggie Nelson's Bluets in college, for example, while taking a color theory class. I assumed based on the title that it would help me with my homework."

"A.O. Scott who's this film critic he has this book titled Better Living Through Criticism and he talks about that phrase of like all critics are failed artists."

"I think he is perhaps the reason why Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott is so popular in Silicon Valley."

"Whenever I call my parents they're like on Duolingo. They're trying to learn Chinese and Spanish and I find it very charming that they're relatively elderly now but they're like it's time to learn new things."

"My dad was like making apps in Swift and he's like very curious about live coding and he's like please explain to me how this works."

"when he was talking about his new project Metal Label and how they built all these features where like you can publish something or sell product on Metal Label and you can create these revenue splits"