It should surprise no one that the life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author’s childhood. A writer’s childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.
|
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an "injustice collector", and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.
Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Robertson Davies If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats. Aldous Huxley They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" Samuel Butler I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat. Edgar Allan Poe Poets generally love cats-because poets have no delusions about their own superiority. Marion Garretty I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul. Jean Cocteau A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem. Jean Burden Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate. Ralph Waldo Emerson In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown. H. P. Lovecraft To understand a cat, you must realize that he has his own gifts, his own viewpoint, even his own morality. Lilian Jackson Braun The cat has always been associated with the moon. Like the moon it comes to life at night, escaping from humanity and wandering over housetops with its eyes beaming out through the darkness. Patricia Dale-Green You now have learned enough to see That cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind For some are sane and some are mad And some are good and some are bad And some are better, some are worse But all may be described in verse. T. S. Eliot My experience with trying to help people to write has been limited but extremely intensive. I have done everything from giving would-be writers money to live on to plotting and rewriting their stories for them, and so far I have found it all to be a waste. The people whom God or nature intended to be writers find their own answers, and those who have to ask are impossible to help. They are merely people who want to be writers.
|
I am a trader of jacks and a jack of all trades!
Do you like this blog? You can have links to blog posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.
Categories
All
Archives
January 2015
|
RSS Feed
