February 2012
1 post
2 tags
“Every man needs aesthetic ghosts in order to live. I have pursued them, sought...”
– From the farewell speech of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, translated and presented as the opening monologue of the recent documentary L’amour fou.
(via adamnorwood)
April 2011
1 post
“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
– Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text. [via proustitute] (via skibinskipedia)
March 2011
3 posts
“Writing isn’t just telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling...”
– Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (via secretfragileskies)
“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our...”
– Henry James (via hereisthenode)
February 2011
11 posts
1 tag
“I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don’t need tricks...
“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”
– D.H. Lawrence (via theories-of)
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see...”
– Joan Didion, “Why I Write” (via sayyes)
2 tags
The very question of where Kafka belongs is already something of a scandal given the fact that the writing charts the vicissitudes of non-belonging, or of belonging too much. Remember: he broke every engagement he ever had, he never owned an apartment, and he asked his literary executor to destroy his papers, after which that contractual relation was to have ended.
- Who Owns Kafka?, Judith...
hope for bookkeepers
When Don Quixote is dubbed a knight – a key moment in the history of the novel – the local innkeeper swears him in on an account book. Balzac is known to have kept on his bookshelf, beside the published edition of his Contes Drolatique (Droll Tales), a black-bound volume titled Comptes Mélancoliques (Melancholy Accounts): a compendium of his debts. What is the secret relationship between...
“The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into...”
– Freud, An Autobiographical Study (via tendingtotend)
3 tags
If you ask what an Irish schoolgirl was doing reading Japanese literature in the 1970s then you cannot know what Ireland was like in the late 1970s. It was perhaps, as Shelley wrote and I transcribed on the green vinyl cover of my school folder (just above some Led Zeppelin lyrics), ‘the devotion to something afar, from the sphere of our sorrow’. I knew that I wanted something foreign when I...
She recited lines from W.H. Auden’s “The Novelist:” The writer “Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn / How to be plain and awkward, how to be / One after whom none think it worth to turn,” Auden wrote. This is what it means to be a good writer, she tells her students: Give up attempts to prove their brilliance in every line and let their characters be silly, evil, stupid.
Zadie...
“A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out...”
– Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking, Anne Carson (via leprintemps)
“It would be terrible if the explanation of the work were outside the work...”
– Isak Dinesen (via theparisreview)
January 2011
5 posts
“Art is missing home even when we are at home. In order to do so, one must be an...”
– Søren Kierkegaard (via mianoti)
“It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could...”
– Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)
“I think grief is creative. And, in some awful way, boredom is creative.”
– Margaret Drabble
“When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of...”
– Geoff Dyer (via Maud Newton)
“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was...”
– Toni Morrison (via heckyeahtonimorrison)
December 2010
3 posts
“YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO SPEND TIME MAKING THINGS FOR NO KNOWN REASON”
– Lynda Barry, my only hero, in Picture This. (via kfan)
“Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on...”
– Anne Carson (via aperfectcommotion)
“The more you refuse life, the more you write. This is writing.”
– Bhanu Kapil, Incubation (via invisiblestories)
November 2010
5 posts
“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the...”
– Vladimir Nabokov (via quietpulse, thelittlesea)
SIMENON
Writing is considered a profession, and I don’t think it is a profession. I think that everyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else. Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
SIMENON
Because, first, I think that if a man has the urge to be an...
“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for...”
– Margaret Atwood (via mianoti)
October 2010
7 posts
airwalker:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why...
“The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.”
– Susan Sontag (via senhoritaspencer, aperfectcommotion) (via insalatadiparole)
“I have often reaped what others have sowed.
My work is the work of a collective...”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832)
“We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.”
– Francine du Plessix Gray
“What I am, it is useless to say - those whom it concerns feel and find it out....”
– Charlotte Brontë (via applepieskies)
“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever...”
– Helen Keller (via robot-heart)
“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter 3, Letters to a Young Poet (Translated by M. D. Herter Norton)
September 2010
9 posts
“If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams, and I don’t want to...”
– Werner Herzog, while making Fitzcarraldo. (via foxbat)
“All obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born.”
– J. G. Ballard (@parisreview)
“When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship,...”
– Anne Michaels, Canadian poet and novelist (via tender)
“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has...”
– Leo Tolstoy
“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”
– Simone Weil (via libraryland)
“To hell with genius. Work hard.”
– James Victore — from Victore or, Who Died and Made You Boss? (via thegreatuncovery)
“Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the...”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés (via crashinglybeautiful)
The Anatomy of Melancholy: “Did I ever tell you... →
“I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.”
Buddy’s letter to Zooey, from Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger.
horoscopes
August 2010
7 posts
“What interests me is the conquering of the fear, the hiding, the running away...”
– Louise Bourgeois (via 42andpointless) (via mianoti, eunichick)
saturn rising: Louise Glück, from "Proofs and... →
“It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it…
“Je pense aves mes mains et il m’arrive de reflechir avec mon coeur”
– Tomi Ungerer
After a glut of YA fiction, I recognize that all newly published work is a pre-novelization of future films.