All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control. To be real.
America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.
In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.
A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.
Sometimes we esteem others more important than ourselves. We always become the martyr. It is wonderful to be self-sacrificing, but watch out for self-disdain! If we don’t apply some of the medicine that we use on others to strengthen ourselves, our patients will be healed and we will be dying.
I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
Life will go on as long as there is someone to sing, to dance, to tell stories and to listen.
Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.