Literary Bits for September 17

Thoughts on writing from authors born September 17:

from novelist and short-story writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky (Fata morgana) (1864-1913):

Poetry cannot live in a trash can, and without it life is a crime.

from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet William Carlos Williams (Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems) (1883-1963):

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

A poem is a small machine made out of words.

from fiction and non-fiction writer Frank O'Connor (Guests of the Nation, The Big Fellow) (1903-1966):

Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness.

There are three necessary elements in a story—exposition, development, and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as "John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X"; development as "One day Mrs. Fortescue told him she was about to leave him for another man"; and drama as "You will do nothing of the kind," he said.

from artist and film director M. F. Husain (Through the Eyes of a Painter) (1915-2011):

They can put me in a jungle. Still, I can create.

from Oscar-winning screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (Heureux Anniversaire and Honorary) (1931-2021):

The dream of a writer is to be surprised by his characters. All of a sudden, they are living their own lives; they are not prisoners anymore… Tati taught me how to observe, how to sit in a cafe in Paris and to look at the passersby and to guess what their story is, even a little moment of their story.

from rocker Keith Flint (The Prodigy) (1969-2019):

I think anyone who's willing to be brutally honest with who they are and express themselves is always going to get the oddball label, the pyscho label, the twisted label. That's what happens.

The point is to be true to yourself—otherwise you may as well give up.