Richard Powers

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

                        --Richard Powers

Dylan Thomas

 

"I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy."

-- Dylan Thomas

Ray Bradbury

“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at
night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”--Ray Bradbury

Carlos Labbe

 

"He'd been mistaken, he said to himself, as he sat back down at his desk: he didn't want to write a detective novel; he wanted to write a mystery."

--Carlos Labbé

The labyrinthine page

"You can always edit a bad page.
But you can't edit a blank page."

    

      I've been seeing this quote on social media a lot lately, and it's true as far as it goes. But there are hazards involved with filling up a page, and they often go unexamined. Because every word choice constrains the next choice. "A" rather than "an" means that you have eliminated all words with a vowel in the choice of the following word. The word "I've" in at the head of my first sentence locked in the tense for the following clause. The sentence "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" casts an entire novel irrevocably into the past. "Once upon a time" sets us in a fairy tale. "Once upon a time there was a Martian" warns us to reassess what we know about fairy tales. Each choice narrows the options for the next choice. A manuscript becomes a labyrinth that we seed which grows up behind us with alarming swiftness so that when we look back it's already too high to see over the top. 

     Can't we go back? Can't we change "A" to "an"? Of course. But then we must change "pachyderm" to "elephant", which is not quite the same thing.  And the further we advance, the more we may need to change, the more tremors are sent out under the structure we're creating, and what if it's not a word we need to change, but a sentence, a page, a chapter? There comes a point where we must change our nail scissors for hedge clippers, or a bundle of dynamite. Then, if you use too much blasting powder, the whole edifice may come down around your head.

     Which is not to say that you can't edit a bad page. You must edit a bad page, and you will have many bad pages. And chances are good you may need that bundle of dynamite. Writing is a dangerous business, not for the faint of heart. If, at the end of building your house, you take off your blindfold to discover that you have positioned the toilet in the kitchen, adjustments will have to be made.

     So while you're contemplating the vast ocean of the blank page, take some time to appreciate its calm, unrelenting beauty. Then recall that there are more vessels under the waves than atop them.
 

Raymond Chandler

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong."                                --Raymond Chandler

Made you look!

This is my definition of art,

straight from Aristotle:

cognition;

reversal;

recognition.

Salman Rushdie

 "A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can."

- Salman Rushdie

Swoopers and Bashers, oh my!

 I'll admit right here and now:

I'm a swooper.

How about you?

Umberto Eco

 

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

― Umberto Eco

Tom Stoppard

 "The whole art of movies and in plays is in the control of the flow of information to the audience. . . . how much information, when, how fast it comes. Certain things maybe have to be there three times."

--Tom Stoppard

Edward Albee

 “Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.”

― Edward Albee

Aaron Sorkin

 

"I like dialogue. It sounds like music. What the words sound like are as important to me as what the words mean."

-- Aaron Sorkin

Claude Levi-Strauss

 

"Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing."

Art Spiegelman

 Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

...On the other hand, he SAID it.”
                  ― Art Spiegelman

John Crowley

 

“Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.”

--John Crowley

Robertson Davies

"Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command.”

Stanislaw Lem

 "The question of genres is simply unimportant for me, and very often I turn to different modes of writing. I want to write about things that interest me and in ways that interest me. One could simply say that I attempt certain mental experiments and try to create certain situational models." 

Frank Loesser

 

"I don’t write slowly, it’s just that I throw out fast."

                     –Frank Loesser

Susanna Clarke

"C. S. Lewis said that all of the Narnia books began with the image of a faun in a snowy wood, carrying parcels. Or I might start with a character about which I know very little, just one or two things (for instance that, as a child, he got lost in some Roman ruins). The important thing is that the idea, whatever it is, has roots, that it goes deep down into the imagination, into the unconscious. Because if it has roots, then it will, with a bit of watering and careful pruning, grow into something quite interesting."

–Susanna Clarke