“Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, ‘Must I write?’ Dig deep into yourself for an answer. And if this answer should be in the affirmative, if you can meet this solemn question. with a simple strong, ‘I must,’ then build up your life according to this necessity.”
— Rainer Maria Wilke, 17 February 1903, “Letters to a Young Poet.”
“One day, you will write a line that feels wrong, but at the same time provides you with a jolt of dissonance, a quickening of the nervous system. You will shake your head and write on, only to find that you come back to it, shake your head again, and carry on writing — yet back you come, again and again. This is the idea to pay attention to, the difficult idea, the disturbing idea…”
— Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files Issue #130, 14jan2021.
“To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding.”
— Jane Jacobs, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” p. 489
“I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, “The novel is dead, the story is dead.” I find this to be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.”
— Chinua Achebe, THERE WAS A COUNTRY, p. 55.
“In my experience, lyrics are almost always seemingly just not coming. This is the tearful ground zero of song writing — at least for some of us. This lack of motion, this sense of suspended powerlessness, can feel extraordinarily desperate for a songwriter. But the thing you must hold on to through these difficult periods, as hard as it may be, is this — when something’s not coming, it’s coming. It took me many years to learn this, and to this day I have trouble remembering it.”
“I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story and so on, ad infinitum.”
“I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations. If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being. Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
“If I can only concentrate myself: this is the great lesson of life. I have hours of unspeakable reaction against my smallness of production; my wretched habits of work – or of un-work; my levity, my vagueness of mind, my perpetual failure to focus my attention, to absorb myself, to look things in the face, to invent, to produce, in a word. I shall be 40 years old in April next: it’s a horrible fact! I believe however that I have learned how to work and that it is in moments of forced idleness, almost alone, that these melancholy reflections seize me. When I am really at work, I’m happy. I feel strong, I see many opportunities ahead. It is the only thing that makes life endurable. I must make some great efforts during the next few years, however, if I wish not to have been on the whole a failure. I shall have been a failure unless I do something great!…”
– Henry James, 11 November 1882, from A TREASURY OF THE WORLD’S GREAT DIARIES.
”My own works, far from smiling on me, irritate me every single time I go over them again.”
— Michel de Montaigne, II:17, “On presumption.”
”The wisdom of the journeyman is to work one day at a time and he always said that any job even if it took years was made up out of a day’s work. Nothing more. Nothing less… In the concept of a day’s work is rhythm and pace and wholeness.”
— Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason.
”… how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day — from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Horsies Upstairs” (2011).
“When the soul is without a definite aim, she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere, you are nowhere.”
— Montaigne, “On Idleness.”
”Challenging music, by its very nature, alienates some fans whilst inspiring others, but without that dissonance, there is no conversation, there is no risk, there are no tears and there are no smiles, and nobody is moved and nobody is affected!”
— Nick Cave, in this morning’s Red Hand Files newsletter, on the risk of losing fans with his new sound.
”I have to write, but in such a way as to vouch for nothing; I shall always be seeking, mostly doubting, rarely trusting myself.”
— Cicero, via Michel de Montaigne, “An apology for Raymond Sebond.”