Kiese Laymon

Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every God ever asked of believers.

Shirley Hazard, Transit of Venus

So far, California offers the greatest contrast imaginable between the works of God and the desecrations of Man. California is a beautiful woman with a foul tongue.

Ernest Hemingway - Letter to Waldo Pierce, 1st Oct 1928

What you ought to do is write you big lazy bastard. My god it is hard for anybody to write. I never start a damn thing without knowing 200 times I can't write—never will be able to write a line—can't go on—can't get started—stuff is rotten—can't say what I mean—know there is a whole fine complete thing and all I get of it is the bacon rinds. You would write better than anybody but the minute it becomes impossible you stop. That is the time you have to go on through and then it gets easier. It always gets utterly and completely impossible.

Thank God it does—otherwise everybody would write and I would starve to death.

Alan Rickman's diaries, 10 March 1994

All morning bonking (screen type), humping, exhausting. Life definitely not mirroring art – if anybody had sex in that position they would break their wrists second time out.

Lemony Snicket, An Unfortunate Series of Events (via Margalo Goldbach)

A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Anti-Fragile

Wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. So you want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

Werner Herzog in IndieWire

In my workshops, [the students] have to make a film within eight or nine days. That has been very helpful for them.

Blaise Pascal

The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this it the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. 

Grayson Morris email to Matt Ruby, August 8, 2022

…Yes, I think like any art form, to understand it, you must go to school for it & no list of principles will suffice. But since I sometimes teach clown, & I'm developing my own pedagogy, here's my list, just for fun:

1 The clown lives to have fun and the clown lives to please the audience. If the clown's fun displeases the audience, the clown is sorry. 

2 The clown relishes in their body and what it can do, especially what it can do that pleases the audience. 

3 The clown is always real, open, present with, and vulnerable to the audience and the audience's feelings. 

4 The clown offers energy and fun for the audience to enjoy. The clown is additionally energized by the audience when they like the clown.

5 The clown has high hopes that they can do something that might be interesting or bring them some status or please the audience. They make promises beyond their abilities and take risks in their endless desire to please the audience. When they inevitably fail, they admit it and are truly sorry. 

6 The clown knows how to make an entrance for the audience and how to make an exit for the audience. 

William Irvine

You always know when you're doing something for the first time, and you almost never know when you're doing something for the last time.

Winston Churchill

If you're going through Hell, keep going.

Samuel Johnson, Johnsonian Miscellanies, Vol II

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Saul Steinberg, via Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without A Country

...what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations.

Mel Brooks, The 2000 Year Old Man

We mock the things we are to be.

Georgia O'Keefe, The Complete Correspondence

I do not like the idea of happiness — it is too momentary. I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.

Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. 

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. 

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Viktor Frankl

What is to give light must endure burning.

Ada Limon

People have done this before, but not us.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times.

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

What we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how.

Paris Hilton on Twitter 2018

If you're not having fun then just leave.

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

Mariame Kaba, “We Do This Till We Free Us”

It's less about 'how you feel' and more about the practice of making a decision every day that you're still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you're still going to get up in the morning. And you're still going to struggle … It's work to be hopeful.

John Dos Passos, Letter to Rumsey Marvin Paris, 29th December 1918

Don't worry about not having an aim. I felt the same way when I first went to college. It took me a good three years to get rid of family bred inhibitions before I realized exactly what I wanted to do. When I think how far I am from doing it I become terrified. Then too I suffer from a multiplicity of desires. I want to swallow the oyster of the world. I want to peel the rind of the orange. I want to drink the cup to the dregs—no—I want to swallow it and still have it to look at. I want to peel off the rind in patterns of my own making. I want to paint with the dregs pictures of gods and demons on the great white curtains of eternity.

George Bernard Shaw

 Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the centre of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight.

Leonard Bernstein

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

Andre Gid

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

Amanda Gorman, "Hymn for the Hurting"

…

May our signed right to bear arms

Never blind our sight from shared harm

…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember.

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be "innate" in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being.

Abigail Adams, letter to John Adams 1776

Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.

Stella Adler, The Art of Acting

There is one rule to be learned. Life is not you. Life is outside you. If it is outside, you must go toward it. You must go toward a person, and if he or she backs off it's their fault. The essential thing to know is that life is in front of you. Go toward it.

Billy Wilder in Paris Review

When I was a writer at Paramount, the studio had a swarm of writers under contract—a hundred and four! They worked in the Writers Building, the Writers Annex, and the Writers Annex Annex. All of us were writing! We were not getting big salaries but we were writing. It was fun. We made a little money. Some like Ben Hecht made a lot of money. All the writers were required to hand in eleven pages every Thursday. Why on Thursday? Who knows? Why eleven pages? Who knows?

Orson Wells

It's only in your twenties and in your seventies and eighties that you do the greatest work. The enemy of society is the middle class, and the enemy of life is middle age.

Mary Oliver, "When Death Comes"

…When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember.

Spike Lee in the New York Times 2-22-22

And when young filmmakers come to you for advice, what do you tell them?

You bust your ass. At work. That's the thing I harp on. Work ethic. Work ethic. Work ethic. You got to work.

Aretha Franklin in Detroit Free Press

You cannot define a person on just one thing. You can't just forget all these wonderful and good things that a person has done because one thing didn't come off the way you thought it should come off.

Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes”

…

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Abraham Lincoln

"I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it… where will it stop?"

Stella Adler, The Art of Acting

There is one rule to be learned. Life is not you. Life is outside you. If it is outside, you must go toward it. You must go toward a person, and if he or she backs off it's their fault. The essential thing to know is that life is in front of you. Go toward it.

bell hooks, All About Love

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf.
Institutions do not protect themselves.
They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about — a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union — and take its side.

Simone de Beauvoir, Letter to Nelson Algren, 1947

It has never been very easy for me to live, though I am always very happy—maybe because I want so much to be happy. I like so much to live and I hate the idea of dying one day. And then I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, and to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish... You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter to his daughter 1854

Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.  

G. K. Chesterton, "Creation Day"

…

Never again with cloudy talk
Shall life be tricked or faith undone,
The world is many and is mad,
But we are sane and we are one.

Lauren Groff, Matrix

All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.