Don’t wait until you feel differently about yourself, (…) don’t wait until you feel you’re up to the task. You’re up to the task, right now, to start.
Ira Glass
Category: quotes
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The danger in technology is not the power the technology has, which can be misused by a person, but that the natural flow of the use of technology argues for banality and conformity and the mundane. And it argues against the unexpected and the accidental and the perverse. So my only advice to music technology people is to be very careful when you automate the process of making something prettier, or regulating something. It’s now kind of normal for people to tune their vocals in the studio to the extent that one vocalist is just as good as another; for a lot of utilitarian tasks, it could be anybody. And as tools become more powerful, you run the risk of reducing essentially everyone to interchangeable elements, because the quirks and the idiosyncracies and the oddities that make us able to discern the difference between one person and another, those disappear. (…) The natural utility of [these tools] argues against the irregularities and the perversities that make music brilliant rather than delivering what is expected.”
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“(…) to affirm life without lying about it.”
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The point (…) isn’t to imagine a parallel universe in which things were easy, but to raise the possibility that they might in fact be easy, here and now.
(…) the irony of what’s going on here is that this prospect – that something meaningful might prove easier than you imagined – can itself be a source of discomfort. Many of us were apparently raised to believe not just that important things can feel difficult (they can!) but that they must feel difficult; that the measure of accomplishment is how much effort it took. And, moreover, that effort is a measure of self-worth — that if an achievement comes easily to you, you must somehow be cheating, or that you just got lucky.
It feels somehow illicit to consider the alternative: that you might already have all it takes (…)
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What can be done? Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to.
(…) Do you. It isn’t easy but it’s essential. It’s not easy because there’s a lot in the way. In many cases a major obstacle is your deeply seated belief that you are not interesting. And since convincing yourself that you are interesting is probably not going to happen, take it off the table. Agree. Perhaps I’m not interesting, but I am the only thing I have to offer, and I want to offer something. And by offering myself in a true way I am doing a great service to the world, because it is rare and it will help.
Charlie Kaufman
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Disregard what other people may think (but not what they may feel).
Lydia Davis
(from “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits”)
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One common mistake – the belief that to draw a cartoon is to draw someone sillier than oneself – must be avoided at all costs.
Hayao Miyazaki
from the Porco Rosso director’s statement
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It is high time for writers — and especially true artists — to admit that it is impossible to explain anything.
Anton Chekhov
(letter to Alexei Suvorin, 1888)
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Many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of “productivity debt”, which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It’s as if I need to justify my existence, by staying “on top of things”
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I don’t linger a lot in self-delusory exercises in control — don’t describe too much or even have to have an objective idea of what a scene is about. My only responsibility to an active imagination is to submit myself to a state of being where characters other than I move around and I try to serve that process. I just get to that — I don’t plan scenes. I don’t outline. I feel my way along because I have come to believe everything you believe about writing instead of writing is bullshit. It doesn’t apply. You can make an outline but an outline is not going to work because it doesn’t apply to what is actually written. I am content to work in uncertainty much more than I used to be — content to not know where I am going.
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No one’s looking for what you can do, they’re just looking at what you do.
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For me, writing a book is not about knowing something and then conveying it. (…) It’s a struggle with something so difficult that it takes all of my resources, and some I didn’t previously know about. Mostly, I don’t know what it’s a struggle with – that’s what I’m trying to find out.
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I feel fraudulent giving advice. I’m a writer narrowly focused on the page in front of me and then the page after that. But maybe that is advice in itself: focus on the page in front of you. That’s what I see in a writer like Toni Morrison. A fierce, unyielding work ethic, focused on the page. She was on a mission from the beginning, to complete this cycle of books and set down her ideas, impressions, and memories, both personal and historical. You can’t distract her from this task. For me, a living example like that was always more useful than “advice”.
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Maybe you don’t know how to do the work in question, and you’re hoping relentless effort might serve as a substitute for that knowledge. Maybe you don’t really want to do it at all, but just think you ought to want to do it, so you’re using “productivity” to try to force the missing desire into being. Or perhaps you think you need a flawless record of achievement in order to justify your existence on the planet – and if the stakes are that high, clearly you can’t afford to put a foot wrong.