Category Archives: Quotes

Forms and Shapes and Textures

All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.

—Barbara Hepworth
in Barbara Hepworth: A Pictorial Autobiography (1978)

Hard to Explain

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

— Annie Dillard

Fragments of Things

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could. And I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.

—Georgia O’Keeffe
in Georgia O’Keeffe (1976)

Only Moments

Sometimes the most moving, altering moments of life are in fact only moments. Sometimes they are not destined to be novels, essays, or memoirs. Sometimes, there is no bigger picture. There is only the truth, and all that I know of it barely reaches the two-hundred word mark.

—April Monroe

The Significance of Silence

Mood and atmosphere are vital in [Chekhov’s] explorations of emotional dilemma which, at times, border on the abstract. For him, the purpose of art is the depiction of unconditional truth and the pursuit of it; he invariably exposes hypocrisy and deception, most emphatically self-deception. Above all, Chekhov, described by Tolstoy as impressionist, understands compromise, downplays plot and avoids conventional denouement. As a playwright he knew both the risks and the significance of silence on stage, of the pause that articulates truth.

—Eileen Battersby

The Effect of Form

There is only one rule in writing a memoir, but it’s an important one: You can’t intentionally lie. This one rule has the effect of form on poetry, setting up a challenge that often forces creativity and makes the work more powerful than free verse.

—Stephen Elliott

The real problem is the middle.

I’m working hard to revise my new novel, THE SILVER GIRL. I am having all kinds of trouble with the end. As I always tell my students, a problem with the end is a symptom. The real problem is the middle. Once you get the middle right, the end will show itself to you.

—Tayari Jones

The thought of himself in a hat

[I]f you ask a 21-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, ”Nobody’s.” He has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.

—Annie Dillard

A blinding flash of inspiration

In Plato’s famous dialogue, Socrates argues that the eponymous Ion and his fellow rhapsodes (the slam artists of Ancient Greece) are possessed by the gods whenever they tread the boards. According to this tradition, the artist, in the throes of creation, is under the influence — be it of the Muses, drugs, alcohol, a dream vision or some other variant of divine inspiration. Ionic Man does not speak: he is spoken through (or played upon like Coleridge’s Aeolian harp), hence the cult of “spontaneous prose” in its various guises. The work of art comes as easily as leaves to a tree, appearing fully-formed in a blinding flash of inspiration or in an accretive, free-associative manner as if under dictation. In both cases, logorrhoea beckons.

—Andrew Gallix

Subjective Truth

No matter how much we want it to be, no story, no story, can be rock-solid “true,” in the sense that it can relate events in the only possible way those events can be related. There’s always another way to look at things. There’s always another perspective.

By freeing ourselves from the belief that what we’re reading “happened just this way,” we free ourselves to see that every story is telling us “a truth” instead of “the truth.” We free ourselves to realize that objective truth may be impossible to find but that subjective truth is just as valuable.

—Mark Blankenship