Art isn’t therapy. We’re not here to work out our personal problems, we’re here to take those problems and completely exploit them to hell with how much we hurt. Actually, the more you hurt, the better.
Smash
Influence isn’t just a matter of copying someone or learning his or her tricks. You get influenced by writers whose work gives you hints about your own abilities and inclinations. Being influenced is largely a process of self-discovery. What you have to do is put all your influences into the blender and arrive at your own style and vision. That’s the way it happens in music—you put a sitar in a rock song and you get a new sound. It’s hybridization again. Hybrid vigor. It operates in art, too. The idea that a writer is a born genius, endowed with blazing originality, is mostly a myth, I think. You have to work at your originality. You create it; it doesn’t create you.
Jeffrey Eugenides, as interviewed by Jonathan Safran Foer, BOMB Magazine Fall 2002
artist ambition check: artist? ambition? check.
JR: How can I fix the world, I am just an artist.
Prize Director: No, no. You don’t need to FIX the world. You just need to CHANGE it.
The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence.
Gertrude Stein, Midnight in Paris (2011)
a creative writer typing from LA & SD.
