Rumination + Illustration = Illumination

(Source: laviedegeek, via thebarrovian)

‘Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’

* Gustave Flaubert

‘My life is created as I narrate, and my memory grows stronger with writing; what I do not put in words on a page will be erased by time … Writing is a long process of introspection; it is a voyage toward the darkest caverns of consciousness, a long, slow meditation. I write feeling my way in silence, and along the way discover particles of truth, small crystals that fit in the palm of one hand and justify my passage through this world.’

* Isabel Allende, from Paula

“The primitive Baptists and the lunatic right are right to be afraid of books with regard to children. If you think of yourself as a child, there’s a period where you have no immunity to ideas. You develop that immunity later on. So I say that literature is a slow-acting poison, because a person will become infected when he or she is unable to defend himself against this infection. But then it’s 20 more years before this person has any power in adult society. I was infected by the essentially socialist writers of the 1930s, Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair and so forth, and so that’s what I am. It’s in my bones. If it had been a disease, it would be a mortal disease. I have tried to infect young people with humanity – an unwillingness, a great reluctance to kill.”

* Kurt Vonnegut

1. Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
2. Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
3. I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
4. Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
5. How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
6. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
7. You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
8. Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
9. I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

* Quotes on writing by Gore Vidal, compiled by blogger Presents of Mind

Going along the North Wales coast by train today; lovely.

“Novelists … fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.”

* Fay Weldon

“Behold an elitist”: wonderful interview with Robertson Davies in The Paris Review.

‘Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition.’

* Graham Greene

This sculpture is called ‘The Writer’, designed by Giancarlo Neri. It was on Hampstead Heath when I walked there with friends in 2005. It is a tribute to the loneliness of writing. The Naples-born artist used six tons of steel and 1,000lb of wood to create the 30 feet high sculpture. When it was on display in Rome two homeless people were said to have lived underneath it. It now resides somewhere in Italy.

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

* Ernest Hemingway

“You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.”

* Arthur Polotnik

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

* Richard Wright

Often, stories of artists’ lives paint them as artists from birth. Their mothers report that they were never without a pencil to scribble with as soon as they could hold one, whether they grew up to be fine artists or writers. It is one of the most enviable qualities in a human, surely, that they knew what they wanted to do with their lives, what they wanted to ‘be’, from such a young age; that they had endless years to pursue and perfect their desires.

All of this is very off-putting to the rest of us.

You never hear about the people who ran through a host of decades without ever picking up a brush or touching a typewriter. Oh, there’s the occasional Mary Wesley type, who gets their first bestseller at 70-odd years old, a source of hope to late bloomers everywhere. But when you get to know a little about these marvels, you discover that they, too, began a neighborhood newspaper — complete with accomplished cartoons — at five; were the leading literary light in their primary school; won the County Art Fair at fourteen; or have been writing daily, or drawing, throughout their lives, but only “for themselves”.

It was this body of myths and legends, I believed, that stopped me - that I allowed to stop me - from becoming any kind of artist. I had mere skirmishes with the creative. I danced through my childhood, acted through my teens, stitched pillows and crafted papier mache bowls in my twenties, and drew exactly four intriguing pencil sketches in my thirties. Now and then I’d read about some lawyer like me who, as in my dreams, quit the law to become a writer.

She would get up at 530 every morning, drink green tea, go for a six mile run, tend her garden, eat an apple and a slice of homemade bread, then settle down to hammer out an entire chapter, with seeming ease, before lunch with her lover. I, lacking any such drive, discipline, focus or infrastructure, would immediately quell the artist hammering at my ribs to get out, and go back to constructing boring legal articles for pointless legal journals.

When I was young, I believed that artists were born, not made. Later, I came to think that artists were made, not born. Either way, I held myself up to these other histories, these impossibly rigid and wholesome daily schedules and self-controls, and felt too inadequate even to begin. I read a mountain of books about how to write without ever writing a word outside the workplace. After a while, it became … what would you call a combination of masturbation and procrastination, psychologically-speaking? Is there a word for that? There should be a word for that. I’ll bet German has one.

But then, at forty, something miraculous occurred. Suddenly, I knew that to be an artist is simply to be a child again, but with keener eyes. You don’t have to run daily to write. You just have to write. And keep writing. Because you want to, for the sheer joy of it. You don’t have to be insane, or French, or a former child savant, to be an artist. You just have to enjoy playing with paper and color, and trust the small voice inside that tells you when to stop. Connect the dots you see in the world, fill the empty spaces. Then, if you want to, throw what you’ve done at the walls of the world outside and see if anything sticks; walls that once you built inside, out of fear.

Writing and reading create silvery threads that connect people through time and space. Someone, somewhere, will think, oh my god! Yes, that, I saw that too. Does it mean anything to make these little connections? It feels like it means something. Only connect, said Forster.’Live in fragments no longer’.

It dawned on me one morning that life itself is an art, and that what works in life works in creation, what works in creation works in life. There are no rules, no permissions. Only some simple truths, the first of which is: get out of your own way, and stop thinking that other lives, other ways of being, somehow have a power stronger than the artist within each of us.

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

* Rainer Maria Rilke

“I think you create a good poem by revising your life … by living the kind of life that enables good poems to come about. It’s much more productive, much more healthful, to feel you are embarked on a writing career in which the way you live your life has something to do with the kind of poems you write. I’m not suggesting being a kind of doomed poet: I’ll drink myself to death in order to write brilliant poems. I don’t believe in that at all.”

* William Stafford