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How about the grandeur of monster films? In monsters like Dracula and King Kong -- I know it sounds like too much of an indictment but it is said out of love -- I found the perfect embodiment of what I am in this country. When I watch King Kong, I think that is me and the airplanes are circling around me and my love is the tall Chrysler Building, but nobody understands that love and they just want to shoot it. I love that kind of paradox. How about the grandeur of Samuel Beckett who wrote like telegrams? In my ideal mind, that is how writing should sound: a telegram that says "Miss. You. Life. Is. In. Trouble." Then "Miss" will be saved.
-- Han Ong
In a lecture she gave five years ago in New York, Nadine Gordimer told her audience that there were two "absolutes" in her life: that racism is "damnation in the Old Testament sense" and "no compromises as well as sacrifices should be too great in the fight against it"; and that a writer is a being in whose sensibility is fused that Lukacs calls "the duality of inwardness and outside world" and he must never be asked to sunder this union."
-- Judith Thurman
No matter how strange or bizarre it might seem at first, always take your writing as far out as it can go. Unless they put some heavy bread in your pocket, if an editor or publisher asks you to change it or tone it down -- fuck
'em!
-- Terry Southern
I used to tell my students, "Walk around the block, come back, and write down what you've just seen, with particular reference to what you were thinking when you saw something, what was in your mind."
-- William S. Burroughs
Compared with the inevitable tragedy and fine gloom of Jude the Obscure, the spiritual temper of Tess is like the vexation over a lost collar-stud. In such moments of everyday life, and throughout early adolescence, one is apt to give way to the sort of pessimism which ascribes the incongruities of life to malignancy in some higher power. Heaven forbid that I blame anyone for gloom. I yield to none, as they say, in misanthropy and pessimism. The trouble about the pessimism of Tess is that it is bogus. If the constitution of the universe is malignant, then malignant ceases to have any meaning. True tragedy consists of taking some theme in daily life, suffering, waste, decay, cruelty, death, separation, that seems in conflict with the benevolent organization of the universe, and by making an artistic and significant form out of the chaos to reconcile it with the universe. That is why it is so much more pretentious to write books about sad and cruel people than about odd and amusing ones.
-- Evelyn Waugh, on Thomas Hardy
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