This is what youth must figure out:
Girls, love, and living.
The having, the not having,
The spending and giving,
And the meloncholy time of not knowing.
This is what age must learn about:
The ABC of dying.
The going, yet not going,
The loving and leaving,
And the unbearable knowing and knowing.
For some reason, online communities seem particularly resistant to the type of elitist promotion structure common in real world institutions. In Academia, high school students have to fight to become undergraduates. Undergraduates have to fight to become PhD candidates. PhD candidates have to fight to become adjuncts. Adjuncts have to fight to become tenured and tenured professors have to fight to become Dean. I can’t even think of a single online community that bears even the slightest resemblance to this sort of power structure.
Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become… They see people whom they admire, or are in some way attracted to, and they try to copy the preferences of those paragons. Such copying can lead to more and more pretension; but in many cases the pretense becomes real: the tastes we aspire to often become our own tastes.
Good art is pointable. Something complex occurs, and you can’t quite explain how you feel about it. Instead, you find the appropriate book, song, poem, whatever, then point to it, and say “That. That is how I feel.” It’s a shorthand that stands in place of your own words. It speaks for you.
It would’ve been a better essay if I’d explained how disillusioned and lost I felt at that moment in my life. But that’s not how we did it back then. We changed every first-person confession into a royal “we” (or a less royal “you”).
The essential thing about writing is not understanding, but the pleasure of reading.
I use a very poor alphabet to express ideas which are very complicated.
Write about the lessons now so familiar they can be recited in your sleep. Write about the insights not yet sighted, their silhouettes blurry like the edges of a distant shore. Write about the job, the joy and chaos of designing and building. Write at least once a week. Write to learn how to write, and write to understand, the process itself like a looking glass through which you may yet discover a strange new world. Write so something meaningful can be said to others. Write to be accountable, write with honesty. Above all, write to preserve the scrap of an age, a voice; write so you won’t forget.
I have no plan to stop making dick jokes or to swear off ragging people who clearly have it coming to them. It’s just that it’s important to me to make world-class dick jokes and to rag the worthy in a way that no one is expecting. I want to become an evangelist for hard work and editing, and I want to get to a place where it shows in everything that I do, make, and share. Yes, even if it makes me sound like a fancy guy who just doesn’t get it.
It reminds me that story is the atomic unit of magic. […] It proves to me that life is about noticing and deeming the mundane as special, and that if you do that, just maybe you can wring the last bits of beauty out of this life while you’re here.
But just because you can’t have opinions about all things doesn’t mean you can’t have opinions about any things. There are some things we know for sure. These might be minor—how to treat your parents, how to grow tomatoes, how to build a house. We each have a few such things. Start there with your feet firmly planted and see how it feels. Then take a few small steps until you reach a place that still feels firm, but where nobody else is standing. Then try to make something beautiful with what you see.
Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I think one of the best things you can do for an artist is to trust them. Especially when they change.
We come to other people’s creative work out of a secret desire and hope that someone understands us better than we understand ourselves. We come to Austen and Kubrick and Basquiat and Aretha under the hopes that they have the same acute feelings, but more able hands and voices that can some how capture that fleeting emotion and crystalize it. We quote, because someone said it better than we can.
I don’t think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. “I can’t say it that way, what way can I find that will do?” One didn’t really bother about the existing modes.
As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.
He was a marvelous critic because he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to do.
Communication must be instant and it must be exact.
It depends on the person looking, because each of us sees only what he knows.
Your heart goes tick tock. Listen to it. Put your hand on it and feel it. Count the beats: one, two, three, four….When you have counted sixty beats a minute will have passed. After sixty minutes an hour will have passed. In one hour a plant grows a hundredth of an inch. In twelve hours the sun rises and sets. Twenty-four hours make one whole day and one whole night. After this the clock is no good to us any more. We must look at the calendar: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday make one week. Four weeks make one month: January. After January come February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. Now twelve months have passed, and your heart is still going tick tock. A whole year of seconds and minutes have passed. In a year we have spring, summer, autumn and winter. Time never stops: the clocks show us the hours, calendars show us the days, and time goes on and on and eats up everything. It makes even iron fall to dust and it draws the lines on old people’s faces. After a hundred years, in a second, one man dies and another is born.
A leaf is beautiful not because it is stylish but because it is natural, created in its exact form by its exact function. A designer tries to make an object as naturally as a tree puts forth a leaf.
I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.
My library is an archive of longings.
Draw a monster. Now tell me: why is it a monster?