"When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know. What you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."
James Baldwin

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
Douglas Adams

"You're not a failure," she told him one day. "No. You're not even embittered. Not like one of those East Europeans, people like Cioran and the rest. You're just unlucky. Like someone... like someone who..." (she was searching for the word and he was wild with gratitude: she's understood me, I'm not a professional failure!)---"That's it. You're like an undetonated shell with its devastating power intact. You're an explosion still waiting to be heard."
Andrei Makine from The Life of an Unknown Man

Eddie helped paint the porch...

When I get the sense that a new book is beginning, I start a notebook into which I put anything that might seem relevant, which could be a large-scale plot idea, something overheard on the bus, or a descriptive phrase that came to me on a walk. I don't actually start writing that book until out of all this has emerged a pretty clear plan for the whole thing. I can't just start writing and see what happens. Of course improvisation is an important part- I would find it dreadfully boring if I planned everything. What keeps you going are the discoveries you make in the course of writing."

Alan Hollinghurs, from an interview in The Paris Review

"only dead fish follow the stream"

- a Finnish expression

"Workmanship of risk is, generally, the making of anything individually by hand, the creation of a product that is never exactly the same twice...

Because the outcome of workmanship of risk is never certain, the quality of it is determined by the care, dexterity, and judgement of the worker...

from Wooden Boats by Michael Ruhlman

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

John Ruskin

"I never if I can help it get into the specifics of songs and their meanings. If you're a songwriter, and your idea is that your songs are helpful to yourself and others, they sort of operate on this sense of mystery. They don't function if they are explained; it puts out the fire." Ryan Adams in nyt interview 10/11/11

treasures found behind the wall at 2107

"He loathed gentility and social convention. To him they smacked of fakery, like the various artistic symbolisms, Surrealism among them, that modern painting had contrived. The real world, stripped bare, already presented unfathomable strangeness and fascination. An artistic life should exhaust itself trying to unpack it."

Michael Kimmelman about Lucian Freud

"Outside it is day. You have entered, and your eyes are blinded with so much darkness. It penetrates deeply into the pupils of your eyes and hurts. You close your eyes for a moment, until they have adjusted themselves. Both are within you, the darkness and the brightness, they are yours in the depths of you retina, and you can draw them from the same well; which it will be depends on whether you stand in the light or in darkness."

from The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heavens sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."

from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

"... in America, where a national bent for proprietary branding can confuse a signature look with quality."

Peter Schjeldahl in a review of Blinky Palermo

"If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?"

Jaron Lanier

tree i pass on my walk from Union Station to NMAI

The television stayed on day and night, singing like a Siren in the crowded house. “Come sit by me and die a little,” it said.

Salvatore Scibona from Where I Learned to Read in the June 13 New Yorker

"It took me years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you're raising questions, and a lot of people think you're playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don't know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers.

At readings I'm quite often speechless, actually. I am very happy that I am striking a nerve. But it's when they take it a step further and think that i have the salve for the nerve I've hit, or that I have personally lived through that myself, and that therefore we have a common bond, because they have also lived through that - then I begin to realize that what is between me and other people isn't kinship but a kind of gulf."

Anne Beattie in The Paris Review