Ten quotes that help me to think about writing
My current life-support system
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When I’m deep into a manuscript (as I am at the moment; two-thirds through…), I find it hard to read other books. Not only do they make me feel terrible (because they are brilliant and fundamentally finished), but they are also more than I can process while my mind is swirling with my own unborn words.
Instead, I keep a document full of quotes - a different one for each book - which I use as a kind of calibration device. Each one of them captures something important to my process, either distilling the essence of what I’m trying to convey in my own work (usually obliquely), or nudging me towards a certain writing mindset. When I get stalled, I open the document and drink them in. Most of the time, they set me straight.
I thought, today, that I’d share the 10 that are guiding me at the moment. They are my life-support system. Maybe they’ll help you too.
‘After I've written a few lines I let the words slip back into the creature of their language. And there, they are instantly recognized and greeted by a host of other words, with whom they have an affinity of meaning, or of opposition, or of metaphor or alliteration or rhythm. I listen to their confabulation.’
John Berger
‘Under the light of eternity things, the daily trivia, the daily frustrations, fall away. It is all a matter of getting to the center of the beam.’
May Sarton
‘In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.’
Jung
‘It could be that God has not absconded but spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.’
Annie Dillard
‘What a strange folly, to beguile the tedious hours like this all day before my ink stone, jotting down at random the idle thoughts that cross my mind…’
Kenkō (I love that this was written in c. 1331)
“Our body fluids contain about one percent salt, nowadays—very likely the exact salinity of whatever ancient sea we managed to crawl out of, a sea we could leave because we had learned, first of all, to contain it; and that sea is contained and remembered most crucially now in the heart, where salt sloshes back and forth between cells, forming the first thrum of the heartbeat, first hint of the absolute and necessary note from which comes the salt song of You.”
Brian Doyle
‘Mortifications never end. There is always a never-before-experienced one waiting just around the corner. As Scarlett O'Hara might have said, “Tomorrow is another mortification.” Such anticipations give us hope: God isn't finished with us yet, because these things are sent to try us. I've never been entirely sure what that meant. Where there is blushing, there is life? Something like that.’
Margaret Atwood
‘Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations, and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.’
Geoff Dyer
‘Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind - filled with a strong desire to wander.’
Bashō
Win my writing essentials!
Take out an annual subscription this month - or renew an existing one - and you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win a very special box of my my writing essentials. This contains all the items I rely on for my daily writing practice, including a Rhodia notebook, stickers to decorate it, a Herbin refillable ink pen, Diamine ink, bookmarks and blackwing pencils. There’s also a signed copy of Enchantment (and a signed bookplate to stick into your existing copy) and a paperback of this month’s Book Club pick, Matrescence by Lucy Jones.
To enter into the prize draw, just take out an annual subscription to The Clearing, or renew your existing subscription - we’ll gather the names together and draw a winner after 31st August. The winner will be contacted by email.
Good luck! And thanks for subscribing :)
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As a jeweller, I have a few written down - definitely less poetic and more directly practical, but such is jewellery! Essentially, ego begone. Here are two of my favourites:
Don't think about making art just get it done. Let everyone else decide if its good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art. (Andy Warhol)
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up & get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part & a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. (Chuck Close)
That Brian Doyle quote... I have also jotted a few more more words from the same passage:
"No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside."
And then there is Barry Lopez, who wrote on Desert Notes:
"A person cannot be afraid of being foolish. For everything, every gesture, is sacred."