I’m getting anxious, I’m getting more manic. Now, I’m an extreme case because I’m old and I’m overdoing it. But still, it’s really interesting that I can actually feel a change in my neurochemistry from this interaction with the technology.
A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.
I find that the great artists I’ve met are people who are so playfully invested in their process that, even if it doesn’t come out the way they like, they still power through and even take energy from it.
I’ve noticed that nowadays I’m doing a lot of stuff on the phone and on the computer, which I usually wouldn’t do earlier. And I can feel my brain being rewired:
I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn’t even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.
If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences – where things turn out better than you thought they would – ought to be in there somewhere, too.
I was trained in seismic prospecting. We’d drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.
Art is not some inessential frippery – it is the nation’s means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one’s nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.
The scariest thought in the world is that someday I’ll wake up and realize I’ve been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.
To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don’t know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.
In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.
[Writing] is almost like those boats that sit really low in the water; they look kind of ugly. And then you get one of them up to 80 miles an hour and the hull comes up, and it’s a beautiful thing. I’m okay with that for myself.
The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.
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