Quotes: Morton Feldman

"When he did find the time to compose, Feldman employed a strategy that John Cage taught him – it was "the most important advice anybody ever gave me," Feldman told a lecture audience in 1984. "He said that it's a very good idea that after you write a bit, stop and then copy it. Because while you're copying it, you're thinking about it, and it's giving you other ideas. And that's the way I work. And it's marvellous, just wonderful, the relationship between working and copying." 

–– Morton Feldman (1926-1987), American composer 

Source: Mason Currey. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013; p. 15. 

via Commonplace Book 2013-2014, 2014, p. 107.

Quotes: Leo Tolstoy

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." 

–– Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian writer 

via: Commonplace Book 2013-2014, 2014, p. 112. 

Quotes: Jon Fosse

"The act of writing is to me to listen. When I write, I never prepare, I don't plan anything, I proceed by listening. ... At a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears." 

–– Jon Fosse (b. 1959), author, translator, playwright 

Source: Austin Kleon blog July 26, 2024.

via: Commonplace Book 2024, p. 8.

Quotes: Deborah Levy

"All writing is about seeing new things and investigating them. Sometimes it's about seeing new things in old ways."

–– Deborah Levy (b. 1959), South African-born, British novelist, playwright, and poet. 

Source: Deborah Levy. Real Estate: A Living Autobiography. Toronto, ON: Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2021; p. 257.

via: Commonplace Book 2022, 2022, p. 96.

Quotes: Anthony Doerr

"Fiction writing is often an excuse for me to pursue various curiosities I have. And curiosity is really just a form of love: "Are you curious?" is another way of asking, "Are you in love with the world?" In my own work, projects always start with something I get really interested in, like whale standings or insects or venomous snails, or hibernating animals or snowflakes. The research is often the kernel, and I start writing around it; building it out into a spiral sort of, trying to find a character who I can use –– often I go for the most obvious thing, which is to infect the character with the same kind of interest I have (e.g., the shell collector). So when young writers ask for advice, not that I'm qualified to give any, I usually say that part of writing is finding the things in the world that you care the most about, that you care so deeply about you'd never get tired of reading or writing about them, and make those your subjects. For me it has been wonder –– what wonder is, where can we find it. For someone else it might be skateboards, or jazz, or bipolar disorder, or whatever. If you care deeply enough about something, some of that interest and passion will (hopefully) transfer through the page to the reader."

–– Anthony Doerr, American writer 

Source: Austin Kleon Tumblr, Friday July 26, 2024.

via: Commonplace Book, 2022-2024, 2024, p. 189-190.

Quotes: Deborah Levy

"The writing life is mostly about stamina. To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life." 

–– Deborah Levy (b. 1959), South African-born, British novelist, playwright, and poet. 

Source: Deborah Levy. The Cost of Living: A Living Autobiography. Toronto, ON: Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2018; p. 50.

via: Commonplace Book 2022, 2022, p. 94.

Quotes: Oliver Burkeman

"The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day. They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn't be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term. They wrote in daily sessions –– sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours –– and they religiously took weekends off." 

–– Oliver Burkeman (b. 1975), British author and journalist 

Source: Oliver Burkeman. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Allen Lane/Penguin Random House, 2021, p.181. 

via: Commonplace Book, 2022, 2024, p. 140.

Quotes: Paul Lima

"[Diane Baker] Mason is finally living her dream. She has made time to write. To do anything less than that would be a living nightmare, a waste of time for a sober, thinner Mason who finds herself driven by fear. Not the mundane fears of success or failure, but "the fear of being mundane. Of living your whole life and not having tried."" 

–– Paul Lima, Canadian writer 

Source: Paul Lima. "Dreaming of Fat City." The Globe and Mail. Saturday October 13, 2001 (p. D16-17); p. D17. Re: Toronto writer Diane Baker Mason's debut novel Last Summer at Barebones. 

via: Commonplace Book 1999-2001, 2001.

Quotes: Cecil Day-Lewis

"We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand." 

–– Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972), Anglo-Irish poet 

Source: C. Day-Lewis. The Poetic Image quoted in Gabrielle Lusser Rico. Writing the Natural Way. New York: J.P. Tarcher, 1983; p. 29. 

via: Commonplace Book 1999-2001, 2001.

Quotes: Doris Lessing

"Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want." 

–– Doris Lessing (1919-2013), British-Zimbabwean novelist 

via: Striped notebook, 2016, p.1.

Quotes: David Berman

"Writing, for me, is not the act of a master. It is through stupidity; it's through writing 100 bad lines, you get to the one good line. The most important skill, the most important quality that I need to get through that is just to keep my ego together and my esteem together." 

–– David German (1967-2019) American musician, singer, poet, and cartoonist 

Source: Austin Kleon August 30, 2019. 

via: Art Alternatives Knapsack Sketchbook I 2019-2020, 2020, p. 47.

Quotes: Ursula K. Le Guin

"I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And, if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. Nobody ever said it was easy. What they said is: "Life is short, art is long." 

–– Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), American author 

Source: Austin Kleon, October 22, 2019.

via: Art Alternatives Knapsack Sketchbook 2019 i, 2020, p. 23. 

Quotes: James Baldwin

"You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world always changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimetre, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it."

–– James Baldwin (1924-1987), American writer and activist 

Quotes: May Sarton

"I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose –– to find out what I think, to know where I stand."

–– May Sarton (1912-1995), Belgian-born American writer

Source: May Sarton. Journal of a Solitude. 

via: Sketchbook A, 2018, p. 54.

Quotes: Sheryl Crow

"I called [Bob Dylan]. ... I said, "I am totally wigged out and I don't know what I am supposed to be doing, and I've got a lot of pressure to incorporate what's going on." He said, "Go back to your roots. Take out the albums that you loved and play those songs. Get your band together and rehearse those songs, and then you will start writing." And that's what I did." 

–– Sheryl Crow (b. 1962), American musician, singer, songwriter, actress

Source: Rolling Stone, October 31, 2002 

via: Sketchbook 19, 2012, p. 111

Creativity quotes: Annie Dillard

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is a signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly is lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes." 

– Annie Dillard (b. 1945), American writer 

Source: Annie Dillard. The Writing Life. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989; p. 78-79.

Quotes 176: Franz Kafka

"Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within." 

–– Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Bohemian-born writer 

via Commonplace Book 2006, p. 85.

Annie Dillard: Spend it all

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is a signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly is lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

-- Annie Dillard from The Writing Life