Brian Eno
While recuperating after an accident he could barely hear an album of harp music, but he couldn’t get out of bed and cross the room to turn it up. The experience led to the creation of ambient music, which became an entire genre.
Arts
Includes film & television, photography, fine arts, theatre, performance, and literature.
Ursula K. Le Guin on writing
“If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”
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Miles Davis
“The thing to judge in any jazz artist,” said Miles, “is does the man project and does he have ideas.” I felt this was true of everything in life.
Raymond Chandler on writing
“The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.”
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John Cage
John Cage chose music, he said, because “The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings.”
The Rose
I spent two years sitting in a room just a few feet from this legendary, notorious, monumental painting that weighs over a ton, back when it was entombed behind a wall. It only took four decades for me to reconnect with it and see it for real, in person.
Amy Tan on writing
“As I write a story, I have to be open to all the possibilities of what these characters are thinking and doing and what might apply. For me, the best way to do this is writing longhand, the way I write the early drafts of a novel.”
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Akira Kurosawa
When I was thirteen PBS ran The Seven Samurai and I was gobsmacked. “I was young but I realized that I was watching something extraordinary,” was how I put it to a newspaper interviewer years later. You could create a film school based entirely on his films.
Good writing is as much about what you don’t say
You don’t have to spell everything out. Not every thought needs to be explained. Sometimes you convey a fuller world by leaving things out.
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Procrastination IS sometimes your enemy
There’s Bad Procrastination, the kind that makes us chase shiny objects and be lost in the rabbit hole of the interwebs.
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