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Joseph Campbell: “Get thee to an incubatorium.”

10 Jan

Campbell

“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

~ JOSEPH CAMPBELL

January 9th birthday: Jimmy Page

10 Jan

page

“My vocation is in composition — building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.”
~ Jimmy Page, b. 9 January 1944

January 8th birthday: David Bowie

8 Jan

bowie3

“I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.”

~ David Bowie, b. 8 January 1947

Saul Bellow: “Writing isn’t an occult operation.”

8 Jan

FILE PHOTO: Author Saul Bellow Dies At 89

“Every writer’s assumption is that he is as other human beings are, and that they are more or less as he is. There’s a principle of psychic unity. Writing wasn’t meant to be an occult operation; it wasn’t meant to be an esoteric secret.”

~ SAUL BELLOW

Fran Lebowitz: “When I’m not writing I feel like a criminal.”

7 Jan

lebowitz

“Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I’m not writing I feel like a criminal. … It’s horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It’s much more relaxing actually to work.”

~ FRAN LEBOWITZ

January 6th birthday: Khalil Gibran

6 Jan

gibran

“Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.”

~ Khalil Gibran, b. 6 Jan 1883

Dominick Dunne: “Finish your first draft.”

6 Jan

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“The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. “Finish your first draft and then we’ll talk,” he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.”

~ DOMINICK DUNNE

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Confine yourself to simple words.”

5 Jan

Fitzgerald

“Upon mature consideration I advise you to go no farther with your vocabulary. If you have a lot of words they’ll become like some muscle you’ve developed that you’re compelled to use, and you must use this one in expressing yourself or in criticizing others. It’s hard to say who’ll punish you the most for this, the dumb people who don’t know what you’re talking about or the learned ones who do. But wallop you they will and you’ll be forced to confine yourself to pen and paper.

Then you’ll be a writer and may God have mercy on your soul.

No! A thousand times no! Far, far better confine yourself to a few simple expressions in life, the ones that served billions upon countless billions of our forefathers and still serve admirably all but a tiny handful of those at present clinging to the earth’s crust…

So forget all that has hitherto attracted you in our complicated system of grunts and go back to those fundamental ones that have stood the test of time.”

~ F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, in a letter to Andrew Turnbull

January 4th birthday: Michael Stipe

4 Jan

stipe

“I’m not homosexual, I’m not heterosexual, I’m just sexual.”

~ Michael Stipe, b. 4 Jan 1960

Kesey: “Write what you don’t know.”

4 Jan

Ken_Kesey

“One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or 10 years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That’s what you wanted to write about, about what you didn’t know. So. What mysterious time and place don’t we know?”

KEN KESEY