Wise words

 

Thoughts on writing from authors born May 23:

from American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller (Woman in the Nineteenth Century) (1810-1850):

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

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from American children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown (Noisy Book series, The Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon, The Color Kittens) (1910-1952):

In this modern world where activity is stressed almost to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been—it may even be greater—for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs and stories of his own.

A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.

There is a loving way with words and an unloving way. And it is only with the loving way that the simplicity of language becomes beautiful.

A child's own story is a dream, but a good story is a dream that is true for more than one child.

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book, and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself.

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from English children's book author Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising series, The Boggart, King of Shadows) (b. 1935):

The truth is that every book we read, like every person we meet, has the capacity to change our lives. And though we can be sure our children will meet people, we must, must create, these days, their chance to meet books.

Poets find truth by writing about what they love.

Any great gift of power or talent is a burden ... But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law.

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from German-born American writer Ursula Hegi (Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River) (b. 1946):

I don't write for an audience. I write for myself. And if I imagine an audience at all, it's the characters, but I know that I would keep writing even if no one ever published me again, even if no one ever read me again.

"Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a point where you could not go back, where-as the stories changed—it transformed you, too.”

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from American poet, translator, and essayist Jane Kenyon (From Room to Room, Constance, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, A Hundred White Daffodils) (1947-1995):

A poet's job is to find a name for everything; to be a fearless finder of the names of things.

The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

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from Israeli religious author Yehuda Berg (The 72 Names of God: Technology for the Soul, The Power of Kabbalah) (b. 1972):

Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen. What counts is completion. Look at your life and all the half-finished projects sitting on your shelf. Commit to taking on one of these ideas and finishing what you started.

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from American non-fiction writer Nicolas Cole (Confessions of a Teenage Gamer, The Art and Business of Online Writing) (b. 1990):

Give away 99% of your best writing for free. Monetize the last 1%.

In the game of Online Writing, volume wins.

The Golden Intersection of great writing is: Answering The Reader’s Question by Telling Them An Entertaining Story

You are not the main character in your story. The reader is.

Wise words

Thoughts on reading and writing from authors born May 16:

from English novelist and short-story writer H. E. Bates CBE (Love for Lydia, The Darling Buds of May, My Uncle Silas) (1905-1974):

The basis of almost every argument or conclusion I can make is the axiom that the short story can be anything the author decides it shall be;...In that infinite flexibility, indeed lies the reason why the short story has never been adequately defined.

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from American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Studs Terkel ("The Good War": An Oral History of World War II) (1912-2008):

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another.

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from American poet, essayist, and feminist Adrienne Rich (A Change of World, The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems, Diving into the Wreck, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, Atlas of the Difficult World) (1929-2012):

The moment of change is the only poem.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence—words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something—a great deal—to do with how we live our lives.

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from American young adult fiction author Bruce Coville (The Magic Shop series, My Teacher Is an Alien series, I Was a Sixth Grade Alien series, The Unicorn Chronicles, Shakespeare Retellings) (b. 1950):

But, really, why does anyone create? You feel a...a restlessness inside, a need to make something new, something no one has ever seen before. You want to add to the beauty and the richness of the world with a gift, an offering that is uniquely yours. It's an act of selfishness and generosity, all rolled into one.

Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible—from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.

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from American self-help author Richard Carlson (Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff... and it’s all Small Stuff series) (1961-2006):

Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read on.

Wise words

 

Thoughts on Art from creative people born May 9:

from Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset (“I am I, and my circumstance”) (España invertebrada, La rebelión de las masas) (1883-1955):

The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

The poet begins where the man ends. / The man's lot is to live his human life, / the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

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from American author and illustrator of children’s books William Pène du Bois (The Twenty-One Balloons, Bear Party, Lion); co-founded The Paris Review (1916-1993):

Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened.

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from English Tony-winning dramatist Alan Bennett (Beyond the Fringe, The History Boys); also noted for A Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears, Single Spies, The Madness of George III, Talking Heads, The Lady in the Van (b. 1934):

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.

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from Serbian American Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet Laureate Charles Simic (The World Doesn't End); also noted for Selected Poems 1963-1983, Unending Blues (b. 1938):

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

At least since Emerson and Whitman, there's a cult of experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily.

The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.

There's no preparation for poetry.

A poem is an instant of lucidity in which / the entire organism participates.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.

The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.

The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.

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from American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994); also noted for The End of Beauty, Sea Change, P L A C E, From the New World: Selected Poems 1976-2014, Fast, Runaway (b. 1950):

What poetry can, must, and always will do for us: it complicates us, it doesn't soothe.

The primary function of the creative use of language—in our age—is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it. Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails.

Wise words

 

Thoughts on Art from creative people born May 2:

from German poet Novalis (Hymns to the Night, Spiritual Songs) (1772-1801):

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

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from American detective fiction writer Martha Grimes (Richard Jury series, Emma Graham series) (b. 1931):

You can't be blocked if you just keep on writing words. Any words. People who get “blocked” make the mistake of thinking they have to write good words.

“Polly was a writer of many deadlines. There were the ignorable deadlines, the not-to-be-taken-too-seriously deadlines: the deadlines-before-the-deadlines deadlines, and finally, the no-kidding-around deadlines. She set these various dates, she'd told him, to fool herself." (Rainbow's End)

I read somewhere that we never completely forget a thing, that there are the imprints of everything we’ve ever seen or done, all of these tiny details at the bottoms of our minds, like pebbles and weeds that never surface from a river bottom.

I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do—although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was.

There are people who read Tolstoy or Dostoevski who do not insist that their endings be happy or pleasant or, at least, not be depressing. But if you're writing mysteries—oh, no, you can't have an ending like that. It must be tidy.

I'm constantly battling writer's block; it usually takes me two hours to write anything.

Writing is an antisocial act.

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from American romance novelist Anne Stuart (Ice series, The House of Rohan series, Banish Misfortune, Falling Angel, Winter's Edge, 100 + more); received Romance Writers of American Lifetime Achievement Award (b. 1948):

The beginning of a story can come from absolutely anywhere. A line in a song. A dog food commercial. A painting. A bad movie (bad movies are quite often good inspiration – you watch them and start thinking about how they could do it right).

I day dream. I scribble notes and ideas in a notebook, so that I have a general form for what I’m going to be writing. And then I jump into it, feet first. Definitely no details, no outlines, just vague scenes. Scenes do come into my head like a movie, but the weird thing is, I’m such a writer I tend to fantasize in words. I’m not kidding.

Characters always take on a life of their own, god bless them. Since I don’t plan too much ahead I’d be royally screwed if they didn’t. Sometimes they go in the wrong direction, and then I have to rein them in, but usually they go places that are fascinating and unexpected and move the story along in exciting ways.

... in order to survive that childhood, I took refuge in fantasy – in reading, and in telling myself stories. And not for a moment would I trade it in for a peaceful, serene life.

If we don't risk it all, we may as well not write at all.