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David Byrne (b. May 14): “An artist’s creativity comes from torment.”
14 May
“I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?”
~ David Byrne, b. 14 May 1952
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Eudora Welty (b. Apr 13): “If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.”
13 Apr
Eudora Welty (born 13 April 1909, died 23 July 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
Quotes:
- Human life is fiction’s only theme.
- If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.
- A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
- It doesn’t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
- Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
- I’m a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
- Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
- It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.
- Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
- Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
Émile Zola (b. April 2nd): “I am here to live out loud.”
2 Apr
Émile Zola, born 2 April 1840 and died 29 September 1902, was an influential French novelist, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalisation of France. After the publication of l’Assommoir, Zola became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie. His novel Germinal established him as a successful author.
Quotes on writing:
- One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
- The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
- If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
- There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
Sean O’Casey (b. March 30): “Money doesn’t make you happy but it quiets the nerves.”
30 Mar
Seán O’Casey (born 30 March 1880, died 18 September 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist who wrote about life in the slums of Dublin in plays like The Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars.
Quotes:
- Money doesn’t make you happy but it quiets the nerves.
- When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
- All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
- Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its ten thousands.
- Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
- Laughter is wine for the soul – laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness – the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.
- You can’t put a rope around the neck of an idea. You can’t put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets. You can’t confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.
Vincent Van Gogh ( b. March 30): “I put my heart into my work, and lost my mind.”
30 Mar
“I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”
~ Vincent Van Gogh, b. 30 March 1853
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Maxim Gorky (b. March 28): “Science is the intellect of the world, art its soul.”
28 Mar
“Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.”
~ MAXIM GORKY, b. 28 March 1868
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Lady Gaga (b. March 28): “I don’t see myself in terms of artifice.”
28 Mar
“I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically.”
~ Lady Gaga, b. 28 March 1986
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Jonathan Ames (b. March 23): “I don’t know what’s more difficult, life or the English language.”
23 Mar
Jonathan Ames, born 23 March 1964, is an American author of novels and comic memoirs, which include Wake Up, Sir! And The Extra Man. He was also a columnist for the New York Press. He created the HBO television series Bored to Death.
Quotes on writing:
- I don’t know what’s more difficult, life or the English language.
- A lot of writing is a form of seeing – putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.
- People don’t expect too much from literature. They just want to know they’re not alone with being confused.
- A lot of writers, probably because they’re sensitive and that makes them want to be writers, have fears about their masculinity, so they overcompensate by having an interest in boxing and tough-guy things.
- When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.
Richard Condon (b. March 18): “Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.”
18 Mar
Richard Condon (born 18 March 1915, died 9 April 1996) was a prolific and popular American political novelist whose satiric works were generally presented in the form of thrillers or semi-thrillers, including Prizzi’s Honor and The Manchurian Candidate.
Five quotes on writing:
- Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.
- I’m a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I’m a pawnbroker of myth.
- Amateur psychiatric prognosis can be fascinating when there’s absolutely nothing else to do.
- I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It’s the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what’s going to happen three hours from now.
- Although the paranoiacs make the great leaders, it’s the resenters who make their best instruments because the resenters, those men with cancer of the psyche, make the great assassins.
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