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Toynbee Convector. “…to gently lie and prove the lie true… everything is finally a promise… what seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born…”
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Now, it’s your turn. Jump!
What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
“The Lake”
Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Do not, for money, turn away from all the stuff you have collected in a lifetime. Do not, for the vanity of intellectual publications, turn away from what you are—the material within you which makes you individual, and therefore indispensable to others.
That is the kind of life I’ve had. Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle, as an Irish police report once put it. Drunk with life, that is, and not knowing where off to next. But you’re on your way before dawn. And the trip? Exactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration.
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
many of us plunge forward where angels leave no dustprint.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
I’ve tried to teach my writing friends that there are two arts: number one, getting a thing done; and then, the second great art is learning how to cut it so you don’t kill it or hurt it in any way.
You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won’t let you do it. You’ve got to say, “Well, to hell with you.” And the cat says, “Wait a minute. He’s not behaving the way most humans do.” Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: “Well, what’s wrong with you that you don’t love me?”
Michelangelo’s, da Vinci’s, Tintoretto’s billion sketches, the quantitative, prepared them for the qualitative, single sketches further down the line, single portraits, single landscapes of incredible control and beauty.
Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.
All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration.
WORK RELAXATION DON’T THINK,
ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY, a book by Eugen Herrigel.
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep
