“The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it. If a child learns nothing but that as a guide to life, that’s invaluable. You can’t learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can’t learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can’t learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
–David McCullough
found in “The Title Always Comes Last”
via the inestimable David Graham comes a pointer to this video of Reynolds Price (RIP) explaining the origins of his motto and best piece of advice: “You will only regret your economies.”
Whereas the thing that was fun about a lot of the nonfiction is, you know, its not that I didnt care, but it was just mostly like, yeah, Ill try this. Im not an expert at it. I dont pretend to be. Its not particularly important to me whether the magazine, you know, even takes the thing I do or not. And so it was just more, I guess the nonfiction seems a lot more like play. For me.
–David Foster Wallace
from Scocca : “Im Not a Journalist, and I Dont Pretend To Be One”: David Foster Wallace on Nonfiction, 1998, Part 1.
“Read for pleasure. Read junk. Read every kind of book. But read for pleasure. The reason the Puritans wanted to stamp out poetry was because it gave pleasure. It’s about things you love, things that you care about. Sir Philip Sidney, in the generation before Shakespeare, said, “Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” And it will never end in wisdom if it doesn’t begin in delight and continue in delight. When you read a poem and you think, “God, that is so beautiful, I don’t want to forget that,” and you go on saying it to yourself because you love it, that’s pleasure. That is real pleasure.”
–W. S. Merwin
from Interview in The Progressive (November 2010)
“Today, people say to me, ‘Do you like rap poetry?’ I say, ‘I don’t especially like it. I’m glad it exists.’ That may be the way some people want to hear poetry. It’s better to hear poetry any way than no way at all.”
–W. S. Merwin
from Interview in The Progressive (November 2010)
I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.
As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.
What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.
The period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses.” But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.
So I came up with this word “scenius”–- and scenius is the intelligence of a whole operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.
–Brian Eno, at the 2009 Luminous Festival
as quoted by Synthtopia
“I used to try to make myself look clever by saying I was in search of the narrative saturation point of fiction, but now–don’t you get tired of the phrase experimental novel? If I could present theories directly and well, I might be tempted to do it, but as I can’t, I prefer to discuss the human heart through characterization, and to address the human condition through plot. Many of the masters do the same–Chekhov, Salinger, Austen. When a writer presses the pause button, turns to me and says, Now I’m going to tell you about life, dear reader, I think, This had better be damned good, and if it isn’t, this dear reader makes his excuses and heads for the exit.”
–David Mitchell. from “The Art of Fiction #204″
found in Paris Review (no. 193, Summer 2010)
“I’ve discovered that if you don’t give your guest something to react to, they don’t react. They simply say what they’ve been saying every time they’ve been interviewed. The last thing you want is to have people say to you what they’ve said to someone else.
[...]
I wouldn’t call what I ask questions; I consider them to be lengthy Rorschach blots in words, in language.
[...]
I often say that the writer’s face tells me what to ask. At the beginning of an interview, I try to look straight at the writer, to meet their eye and not break the gaze. I don’t turn it into a game—it’s not who blinks first—it’s meant to be casual. An unbroken gaze leads to an unbroken sentence. As soon as someone blinks or looks away, you get shorter and shorter sentences. If they talk in a long sentence, it’s akin to a meditative state or a state like dreaming or thinking to oneself. I want them to be there.
[...]
Another place where the conventional view of broadcast journalism and interviewing is incorrect, at least for me. With the kind of people I’m speaking to, silence is part of the vocabulary. And almost inevitably, the vocal delivery of a joke or something humorous is about the beauty of a well-placed pause before the aspirated word. I leave in what’s called “dead air” in the technical world of radio. Now that we’re digital, you’d be amazed how the minutest of pauses can be edited out of a sentence. And I don’t want them edited out. I really don’t, because part of the information that the listener is getting—especially the listener who knows the writer, who’s been thinking about or is excited about this writer—is how quickly the writer comes up with an answer to a question. We watch athletes as they pause and ready themselves, and writing is just another skill by someone who’s brought a form to perfection or their own version of perfection.
[...]
Start by doing it. It’s like walking a tightrope, and it should be. The more it’s like walking a tightrope, the more admirable it will be, and the more interesting it will be to your reader or listener. A steno pad prevents you from meeting a person’s eye. And it prevents someone from meeting your eye. Don’t use notes. There’s a conscious and unconscious response when someone sees that you’re speaking to him or her from memory and you trust yourself. You may never know when the answer is going to end or where he’s going to stop, or she’s going to stop, but believe in the politeness of letting someone speak uninterrupted and don’t interrupt. My advice to you: sit forward, listen with all your might, and don’t ever be thinking of your next question.”
–from “Interview with Michael Silverblatt” (host of Bookworm)
found in The Believer (June 2010)
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