When an artist brings me their work, I treat it like food — like a frozen chicken. Like, I have my stove and I didn’t make the chicken, but I can put the right spices on it, and put my stove at a certain degree.
Tag: quotes
There’s no such thing as not playing. Music has rests in it. So you’re on a rest right now, and the music will begin shortly.
Tom Waits. Via austinkleon. Cf. Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk:
We have to start the concert at 8:00 and we have to stop sometime because the halls are rented for a certain time but the music goes on in your mind before and after you play. It’s really just an agreement you make to stop at a certain time. On record, it goes for 40 minutes because an album has these dimensions. It’s just an agreement. But really the music goes on.
Oh you have a dream? You should pay a lot of money for that dream and maybe at the end of a lot of debt you’ll be better at that dream.
Annie Clark on education at Berklee College of Music. Another take in an earlier interview:
At some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music.
I think a lot of people, if they’re not careful, can err on the side of the quantifiable and approach it like an athlete. Run that little bit faster, do that little bit more and think you’re being more successful. But the truth is that a lot of times it’s not necessarily about merely being the best athlete, it’s about attempting a new sport.
It is hardly surprising to find that the two areas of human enterprise most concerned with sincerity as opposed to truth–namely, politics and advertising–are also the two areas most steeped in bullshit. Or would it be better to say that politics and advertising are the two areas most concerned with the appearance of authenticity? This might be a distinction without a difference.
By seven everyone is gone. They all offered to help, and you waved them away. There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.
Excerpt from Bright Lights, Big City, a swift, often funny book with a terrible ending. Another favorite bit:
You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don’t want to invite anyone inside.
More and more, a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms. Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest or rabbi in former days.
Viktor Frankl. For better or worse, who knows?
For a single person, thinking something through marks the end of the reasoning process; it becomes habit. But that gets the married (or life-partnered) person only halfway through at best.
Carolyn Hax. I used to read Hax all the time in the newspaper. Many thanks to Justin for reminding me that she’s still at it.
I’m a big believer in boredom. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything.
Steve Jobs. Sort of paraphrasing here.
The confidence that people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, it is not a judgment of the quality of the evidence but it is a judgment of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.
Viktor Frankl. Remembered this while I was sick the past few days.
Well, we’ve had a good time tonight, considering we’re all going to die someday.
Steve Martin, closing out a night of stand-up. (via)
In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything is irrevocably stored.
If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.
I’m not terribly interested in whether real, brain-chemically-defined Asperger’s is over- or underdiagnosed, or whether it exists at all except as a metaphor. I’m interested in how vital the description feels lately. Is there any chance the Aspergerian retreat from affective risk, in favor of the role of alienated scientist-observer, might be an increasingly “popular” coping stance in a world where corporations, machines, and products flourish within their own ungovernable systems?
Jonathan Lethem. Makes me think of The Age of the Infovore.
People have not yet learned that every work of art is a game played out at the worktable. Nothing is more harmful to creativity than the passion of inspiration. It’s the fable of bad romantics that fascinates bad poets and bad narrators. Art is a serious matter. Manzoni and Flaubert, Balzac and Stendhal wrote at the worktable. That means to construct, like an architect plans a building. Yet we prefer to believe that a novelist invents because he has a genius whispering into his ear.
Umberto Eco. I’ve collected some other good Umberto Eco quotes, but never read any of his works. Open to suggestions…
For what shall I wield a dagger, o lord?
What can I pluck it out of or plunge it into
when you are all the world?
Devara Dasimayya, 10th century Indian poet/saint. (via)
We must be indulgent to the mind, and from time to time must grant it the leisure that serves as its food and strength.
On Tranquillity of Mind – Seneca
As predicted, I’ve been on a stoicism bender. This was a good one to dive into early, as my recent Heraclitus and Seneca might have tipped you off. This bit on friendship was one of my favorite parts:
Nothing, however, gives the mind so much pleasure as fond and faithful friendship. What a blessing it is to have those to whose waiting hearts every secret may be committed with safety, whose knowledge of you you fear less than your knowledge of yourself, whose conversation soothes your anxiety, whose opinion assists your decision, whose cheerfulness scatters your sorrow, the very sight of whom gives you joy! We shall of course choose those who are free, as far as may be, from selfish desires; for vices spread unnoticed, and quickly pass to those nearest and do harm by their contact.
It is hard to contend against passion, for whatever it craves it buys with its life.
We cannot bear toil or pleasure or ourselves or anything very long.
Seneca in On Tranquillity of Mind.
Mark Larson 