If you fancy a nose around please do.
Art
ART: ɑːt (noun) 1. the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.
2. the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance.
“the visual arts”
Patti Smith’s advice to young artists
“A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I’ve done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.
But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people.
Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…”
And I say to them, “Fuck you!”
One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.
When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.”
via austinkleon
The 25 Greatest Quotes About Writing »
reblogging nevver:
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“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain
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“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.” — Clarice Lispector
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“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” — Virginia Woolf
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“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” — James Joyce
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“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway
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“Always be a poet, even in prose.” — Charles Baudelaire
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“Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.” — Gertrude Stein
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“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” — Anaïs Nin
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“One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.” — Henry Miller
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“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.” — Alain Robbe-Grillet
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“James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” — Samuel Beckett
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“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.” — Michel Houellebecq
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“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?” — Kurt Vonnegut
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“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.” — Julio Cortázar
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“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka
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“Reading is more important than writing.” — Roberto Bolaño
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“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” — Ezra Pound
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“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.” — David Foster Wallace
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“The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.” — Vladimir Nabokov
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“…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. — And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
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“The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” — Walt Whitman
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“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.” — Samuel Beckett
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“Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little overexcited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll only get asked two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. ” — J.D. Salinger
“Tarkovsky’s Translations” Sight and Sound 50, no.3, Summer 1981, 152-53, Reprinted in Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews, ed. John Gianvito, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 2006, p.71
“Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn’t have to answer for his meanings. I don’t think so deeply about my work—I don’t know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch to pieces, it doesn’t work. Similarly with a work of art, there’s no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.”
via sloaneohno
“I’ll just go ahead and do it anyway.”
“Unfortunately the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art. They get locked in. That’s our tragedy.
So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed? Our artistic desire doesn’t go away. We want to express, to reveal ourselves… The artistic impulses inside of us are suppressed but not gone.
They can often reveal themselves negatively in the form of jealously. You know the song, “I Would Love to be on TV”? Why would we love it?
TV is full of people who do what we wished to do but never got to. They dance, they act, the more they do the more they are praised. So we start to envy them. We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV. “He just can’t act.” “You call that singing?” “She can’t hit the notes.”We easily say these sorts of things. We get jealous not because we are evil but because we have little artists pent up inside of us. That’s what I think. What should we do? Right now we need to start our own art. Right this minute. Turn off the TV. Log off the internet. Get up and start to do something….
… In my writing class I give students a special assignment. I have students like you in the class, many who don’t major in writing. Some major in art or music and think they can’t write so I give them a blank sheet of paper and a theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood. There’s one condition. You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them. “Come on! Come on!” They have to write like crazy for an hour or two. They only get to think for the first five minutes.
The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly lots of thoughts cross your mind. The artistic devil creeps in. The devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can’t write. “People will laugh at you. This is not good writing. What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!” It will say a lot of things. You have to run so fast the devil can’t catch up.
The really good writing I’ve seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline but from the 40 to 60 minutes they write without knowing what they are writing. And at this moment the nagging devil disappears.
So I can say this: It’s not the hundreds of reasons why one can’t be an artist, but rather the one reason one must be that makes us artists. Why we cannot be something is not important. Most artists become artists because of the one reason.
When we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art enemies appear on the outside. Mostly they have the faces of our parents or our spouses. But they are devils. Devils. They come to earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists. And they have a magic question: “What for?”
But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal. It saves our souls and makes us live happily. So in response to such a pragmatic question, we need to be bold: “Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry to have fun without you.” that’s what you should say.
“I’ll just go ahead and do it anyway.”
Five Years
This day five years ago I followed a link from Susannah Breslin went through the wardrobe and made my first Tumblr post.
I have written many times before how such a seemingly insignificant thing has had such a huge impact on me and my life, but it always worth giving thanks.
I very rarely felt as home here as anywhere before, the number of people discovered, friendships found, projects invented, things made from being here are too many to number.
I’m not sure how long Tumblr will last in this current state, it seems inevitable that it’ll get assimulated by a large corporate amoeba. It’s still a bit clunky, inefficient, infuriating at times but for now it’s still working for me.
So thanks all.
This one’s for you.
x
(cross posted on tumblr)
Henri Matisse to Michael Stein (Gertrude’s brother) postcard
The Frosty Web
My Autumn’s Done Come
Paul Greer 