Wise words

 

Thoughts on Art from creative people born 07 March:

from English astronomer Sir John Herschel (Results of Astronomical Observations, Outlines of Astronomy) (1792-1871):

The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.

Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me in good stead under every variety of circumstances and be a source of happiness and a cheerfulness to me during life and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading.

There is a gentle, but perfectly irresistible coercion in a habit of reading well directed, over the whole tenor of a man's character and conduct, which is not the less effectual because it works insensibly, and because it is really the last thing he dreams of.

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from Dutch abstract art painter Piet Mondrian (The Gray Tree, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, Broadway Boogie Woogie) (1872-1944):

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man.

The only problem in art is to achieve a balance between the subjective and the objective.

In art the search for a content which is collectively understandable is false; the content will always be individual.

I don't want pictures, I want to find things out.

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from French composer, pianist, and conductor Maurice Ravel (Menuet, Pavane, Le Tombeau de Couperin, Boléro) (1875-1937):

I begin by considering an effect.

I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

Whatever sauce you put around the melody is a matter of taste. What is important is the melodic line.

Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

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from American novelist and short story writer Ben Ames Williams (Come Spring, Leave Her to Heaven, House Divided, The Unconquered, Saturday Evening Post) (1889-1953):

An author never has a vacation. He's a walking sponge, sopping up impressions till he's saturated, then going to his desk and squeezing them out on paper.

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from British Emmy-winning and celebrity photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon (Don’t Count the Candles) (1930-2017):

I'm very much against photographs being framed and treated with reverence and signed and sold as works of art. They aren't. They should be seen in a magazine or a book and then be used to wrap up the fish and chucked away.

I believe that photographs should be simple technically, and easy to look at. They shouldn't be directed at other photographers; their point is to make ordinary people react—to laugh, or to see something they hadn't taken in before, or to be touched. But not to wince, I think.

I'm not a great one for chatting people up, because it's phony. I don't want people to feel at ease. You want a bit of edge. There are quite long, agonized silences. I love it. Something strange might happen. I mean, taking photographs is a very nasty thing to do. It's very cruel.

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from British novelist Andrea Levy (Small Island, The Long Song) (1956-2019):

Describe snow to someone who's lived in the desert. Depict the colour blue for a blind man. Almost impossible to fashion the word.

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care.

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from English best-selling novelist Robert Dennis Harris (Fatherland, Archangel) (b. 1957):

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin—the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books—books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.

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from American writer and environmental activist Rick Bass (Where the Sea Used to Be, The Lives of Rocks, Why I Came West, For a Little While) (b. 1958):

There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been.

There are no new stories in nature, only new observers.

Write every day. Don't ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing—and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing. Don't become self-satisfied, don't stop moving ahead, growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?

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from British best-selling novelist E. L. James (Fifty Shades novels) (b. 1963):

Write for yourself. That's it. And write every day.

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from American novelist Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama, Lunar Park, Imperial Bedrooms) (b. 1964):

Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

No one is drawn to writing about being happy or feelings of joy.

It's the rare book that's able to transport you in a way that a movie does.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

All of my books come from pain.

I needed something—the distraction of another life—to alleviate fear.

Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful as finding meaning.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

I write books to relieve myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.

I like the idea of a writer being haunted by his own creation, especially if the writer resents the way the character defines him.

You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you.

Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.

I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.

You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.

There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

I don't know why I write what I write.

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from American writer and folklorist Ari Berk (The Undertaken trilogy, Secret History series, William Shakespeare: His Life and Times, Goblins!, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Letters, The Runes of Elfland) (b. 1967):

I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us.

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from American best-selling fantasy writer Brent Weeks (The Night Angel trilogy, Lightbringer series) (b. 1977):      

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

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from American screenwriter Kyle Killen (Lone Star, The Beaver, Mind Games, Halo) (b. 1981):

I tend to be really interested in characters who, instead of just asking the question, end up exploring what it would mean to try to have it more than one way.

Writing is like a heroin addiction—if you can quit, you totally should.

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from American best-selling poet and activist Amanda Gorman (The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, The Hill We Climb, Call Us What We Carry); the first National Youth Poet Laureate (b. 1998):

Words matter, for

Language is an ark.

Yes,

Language is an art,

An articulate artifact.

Language is a life craft.

Yes,

Language is a life raft.

 

I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.

I was obsessed with everything and anything; I wanted to learn everything, to read everything, to do everything. I was constantly on sensory overload. I’d hoard dozens of books in my second-grade cubby, and literally try to read two at a time, side by side.

Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s always been the language of bridges.

You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all have this capacity to find solutions for the future.

Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.

Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.

Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.