The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.
“Interviewer: Finally, a fundamental question: As a creative writer what do you think of the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?
Hemingway: Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?”
“Nabokov wrote most his novels on 3” x 5” notecards, keeping blank cards under his pillow for whenever inspiration struck. Seen here: a draft of Lolita.”
(via austinkleon)
Source: LIFE
FontShop’s Best Typefaces of 2011
“Another year has whizzed by! While last year saw the real breakthrough for webfonts, this year we witnessed the introduction of mobile fonts and the promise of more diversity and typographic refinement in mobile apps. Yet the news in type was not dominated only by technology. Our beloved type designers cooked up delicious new digital faces for FontShop’s menu of typographic treats.
To celebrate the end of another exciting year in type, our type experts put their heads together to compile our annual “Best Of” list, highlighting the typefaces that surprised, impressed, and delighted us. (And if the “Best Of“ list whets your appetite for fonts, check our Newsletter Archive for more morsels. All this year’s new typefaces are in there.)”
I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect, anyway, and I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person.
But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really. They have a certain appearance of fragility, these neurotic people that I write about, but they are really strong.
Tennessee Williams
from “Williams: Twenty Years after Glass Menagerie“ by Joanne Stang, New York Times, 1965
Source: The New York Times
Creativity is almost a mortal sickness. It’s not easy to be happy and creative: With creativity comes great anxiety, great effort, great desire for love. To be creative, you have to be curious, generous, to want to try to understand.
You also have to want to be loved.
Source: Wired
Letters to a Young Artist: Thomas Nozkowski
In the summer of 2005, artonpaper magazine published a special issue titled “Letters to a Young Artist,” inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” It included a collection of twelve letters by established artists written in response to a letter from a fictional “young artist” – a recent art school graduate who is struggling with the moral and practical implications of being an artist in New York City.
Click through for letter.
Source: magazine.saatchionline.com
Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one).
We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust.
To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about: the rest is just about men and women, imagined loves and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you life a stone.
If the author lived what he wrote in this spirit, Bolaño liked to say, the reader would naturally feel the urgency and live it too: “If the poet is caught up in things, the reader will have to be caught up.
