“After a while it becomes clear that there is no single unitary narrative nor a single mystery, but that there are many, branching out from each room and door, suggesting an infinity of readings and of occupations.”
Quotes
“…like “Rite of Spring” in Disney’s Fantasia … our internal devils may destroy and renew us through the technological overload we’ve invoked.”
“Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.”
Inherent Vice
“Back when, she could go weeks without anything more complicated than a pout. Now she was laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on him that he couldn’t read at all. Maybe something she’d picked up at acting school. “It isn’t what you’re thinking, Doc.””
The Value of Literacy
“I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.”
(See also “This is how I read” and “the tyranny of belief in linear time.” (via robertogreco)
Pinter in 1978 – 02.05.16
I dated this because there probably’ll be more than one.
There was a recent rescreening of 1978 interview.
This on writing his first play
I wrote that play totally without calculation. In other words, I started at the top and at a certain point There was a knock at the door and someone came in, and I had absolutely no idea who he was, who he might be, what he might say, and I let it run. I let it happen, and found that he did have a voice, that he was the Landlord, in fact. That was the first chapter.
The two visitors arrived, and I didn’t know what they were on about really, or what they wanted. They were just part of the whole atmosphere.
This on starting:
It remains the essential joy of writing, I think. You’ve got a blank page, one moment, there’s nothing on it, and the next moment there’s something on it.
Now if you know what that something’s going to be, really, fully and comprehensively before you get to it, I don’t quite see where the spring of discovery can exist.
The discovery exists in the act of discovery.
On Rational Faith in the Human Spirit
Humanist radicalism … seeks to liberate man from the chains of illusions; it postulates that fundamental changes are necessary, not only in our economic and political structure but also in our values, in our concept of man’s aims, and in our personal conduct.
To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible; it is the paradoxical hope to expect the Messiah every day, yet not to lose heart when he has not come at the appointed hour. This hope is not passive and it is not patient; on the contrary, it is impatient and active, looking for every possibility of action within the realm of real possibilities.
– Erich Fromm from “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”
Also:-
The situation of mankind today is too serious to permit us to listen to the demagogues — least of all demagogues who are attracted to destruction — or even to the leaders who use only their brains and whose hearts have hardened. Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with — the love of life.
As highlighted by Brain Pickings
“Because with linocut, once your hand carves it, it is gone.”
“I never use the “Undo” command on my computer while drawing.”
A Game of You
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
Musemathematics
“Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn’t see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is.”
– James Joyce from Ulysses
Paul Greer 