“Look beneath the surface: never let a thing’s intrinsic quality or worth escape you.”
quotations
from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart beating. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
Raymond Carver on writing
“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
Edward Albee on writing
Interviewer: You have said that it is through the actual process of writing that you eventually come to know the theme of your play. Sometimes you’ve admitted that even when you have finished a play you don’t have any specific idea about its theme. What about that?
Albee: Naturally, no writer who’s any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about. But at the same time, writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about. To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind–in my case at any rate–without my knowing it, before I sit down to write. So in that sense, I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is. I always find that the better answer to give. It’s a question I despise, and it always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question which I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy–the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself. If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully, it can evaporate and vanish. It’s not only terribly difficult to talk about, it’s dangerous. You know the old story about the–I think it’s one of Aesop’s Fables, or perhaps not, or a Chinese story–about the very clever animal that saw a centipede that he didn’t like. He said, “My God, it’s amazing and marvelous how you walk with all those hundreds and thousands of legs. How do you do it? How do you get them all moving that way?” The centipede stopped and thought and said, “Well,I take the left front leg and then I–” and he thought about it for a while, and he couldn’t walk.
from Song of Songs
From the lairs where lions crouch hidden,
Where leopards watch nightly for prey,
Look down, look down and come away!
translated by Marcia Falk
from Hafiz 2
“No one knows in which shell the priceless pearl does hide.”
translated by Thomas Rain Crowe
from Haliz
Only great poems can capture the hearts of those who don’t read;
So poets, sing! Let the God-of-Oceans fill your mouths with pearls.
O Haliz, if you are seeking the pearl of union, do this:
From tears, make yourself an ocean. . .and then dive!
translated by Thomas Rain Crowe
Dorothy Parker on her writing method
Q: How do you actually write out a story? Do you write out a draft and then go over it or what?
Parker: It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence–no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
Q: How do you name your characters?
Parker: The telephone book and from the obituary columns.
Q: Do you keep a notebook?
Parker: I tried to keep one, but I never could remember where I put the damn thing. I always say I’m going to keep one tomorrow.
Q: How do you get the story down on paper?
Parker: I wrote in longhand at first, but I’ve lost it. I use two fingers on the typewrtiter. I think it’s unkind of you to ask. I know so little about the typewriter that once I bought a new one because I couldn’t change the ribbon on the one I had.
Tennessee Williams on Young Writers
“If they’re meant to be writers, they will write. There’s nothing that can stop them. It may kill them. They may not be able to stand the terrible indignities, humiliations, privations, shocks that attend the life of an American writer. They may not. Yet they may have some sense of humor about it, and manage to survive.”
Neil Simon on women
“I never feel threatened by women. I have enormous respect for them. I would also usually rather be with them than with men. I’m not much of a male bonder. I have male friends, obviously, I belong to tennis clubs. But in a social situation, I’d generally rather talk to a woman because it’s like a play: you’re getting the opposite point of view. You talk to a man, you’re getting your own point of view. It becomes redundant. But when you’re with a woman, that’s when the sparks fly, that’s when it’s most interesting.”
Leonard Durso 