“I like kids, and I like being around kids - but it was never an ambition, something, like, I need…
I like working. That’s what I like doing. I like to work.”
— Zooey Deschanel, Marie Claire May 2012 (out April 17)
I remember an old Catholic joke about a man who spent his whole life going to a church every day, and prayed to the statue of a great saint, begging, “Please, please, please, let me win the lottery.” Finally, the exasperated statue comes to life and looks down at the begging man and says, “My son, please, please, please, buy a ticket.
By the fall of 2011, technology had taken a lot of the intrigue out of life. The Internet had everyone’s wall of information; nothing was a mystery anymore.
But kids, there was a time before that, way back in the dark ages. Then came the smartphone. And the bar room debate was dead.
Mystery vs. History, How I Met Your Mother
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.
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.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence.
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it. Don’t cheat with it.
Ernest Hemingway
Because I mooched off @cashleelee after seeing her post a different Hemingway quote on Facebook. Teehee.
(via dynamicbovine)
People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.
“Sometimes we don’t realize that we are compromising ourselves. To understand that a person is not good for you, or that that person is not treating you in the right way, or that he is not doing the right thing for himself—if I stay, then I am not doing the right thing for me. I love myself enough to walk away from that now.”
- Jennifer Lopez, Vanity Fair September 2011
a creative writer typing from LA & SD.
