Tag: quotes

~ Mark

It’s an odd feature about the way human beings work that there are many things that we’re interested in that we don’t know if it’s acceptable to be interested in them. […] I think that’s the role of many, many art forms–to legitimate certain questions and certain sensitivities.

Alain de Botton in Philosophy Bites. This reminds me of some of Tyler Cowen’s arguments in The Age of the Infovore:

Sociological approaches to cultural taste often imply that taste differences are contrived, artificial, or reflect wasteful status-seeking. The result is that we appreciate taste differences less than we might and we become less curious. Neurological approaches imply that different individuals perceive different cultural mysteries and beauties. You can’t always cross the gap to understand the other person’s point of view, but at the very least you know something is there worth pursuing.

~ Mark

All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you.

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (via Austin Kleon)
~ Mark

The single worst argument Siskel and I ever had came after a coin flip, when we were unable to decide what we had been flipping for. We eventually had a two-out-of-three flip to settle the question of the original flip.

Roger Ebert.
~ Mark

I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

Michel Foucault (via viafrank). See also Clive James:

Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start.

and Anthony Lane:

Of all the duties required of the professional critic, the least important—certainly the least enduring—is the verdict.

~ Mark

Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be. […] One of the central problems with narrative nonfiction is that the best narratives aren’t messy and complicated, while nonfiction nearly always is.

Felix Salmon. I was so glad to see this article this afternoon. I just created my life is messy tag last night. (via)
~ Mark

If you look inward and concentrate only on your own desires all the time, you end up having fun some of the time, but a large amount of the time you’re miserable and another portion of the time you’re bored. I’d rather be attentive and curious all the time so I just keep my eyes and ears open to the world beyond myself.

John Cage, in People magazine of all places. 1979. (via Alex Ross)
~ Mark

When you go to the cinema — the first two or three minutes of any film are amazing. Because the screen is so big. The scale. Directors can pretty much do anything for those first few minutes. It doesn’t matter how many films you see — it’s still kind of a moment.

Jonny Greenwood.
~ Mark

Post-industrial creatures of an information economy, we increasingly sense that accessing media is what we do. We have become terminally self-conscious. There is no such thing as simple entertainment. We watch ourselves watching. We watch ourselves watching Beavis and Butt-head, who are watching rock videos. Simply to watch, without the buffer of irony in place, might reveal a fatal naiveté.

William Gibson on Twitter, in 1996. Cf. Marshall McLuhan, (via)
~ Mark

A book exists at the intersection of the author’s subconscious and the reader’s response. An author’s career exists in the same way. A writer worries away at a jumble of thoughts, building them into a device that communicates, but the writer doesn’t know what’s been communicated until it’s possible to see it communicated.

William Gibson. Reminds me of Umberto Eco:

I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.

And Montaigne:

An able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.

~ Mark

Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say.

William Gibson on reading Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius for the first time. Filed under: Borges; William Gibson.
~ Mark

When we’re shown an image we tend to let our guard down. People learn how to read critically and think critically, but I don’t believe we learn how to see critically.

Errol Morris.
~ Mark

Writers, it seems to me, should write, not make speeches. But speeches, like quasi-journalistic writing assignments, can come attached to plane tickets, to hotel rooms in cities one might never have thought of visiting otherwise. In writing speeches, curiously, one sometimes finds out what one thinks, at that moment, about something. The world at large, say. Or futurity. Or the impossibility of absolutely grasping either. Generally they make me even more uncomfortable to write than articles, but later, back in the place of writing fiction, I often discover that I have been trying to tell myself something.

William Gibson on creative transference.
~ Mark

One of the more peculiar, more semiconscious exercises I practiced, early in my fiction-writing career, consisted of reading record reviews in, say, Melody Maker, while pretending that I was actually reading a review of a new science fiction novel. I would later attempt to recall that novel, my sense of it from the review, as a species of writing-prompt.

William Gibson. Imaginative reading, recalling, repeating… Ben Franklin did the same thing to improve his writing as a teenager.
~ Mark

We [are] shaped as writers, I believe, not much by who our favorite writers are as by our general experience of fiction. Learning to write fiction, we learn to listen for our own acquired sense of what feels right, based on the totality of the pleasure (or its lack) that fiction has provided us. Not direct emulation, but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture.

William Gibson via Brain Pickings. I just picked up this book. Really looking forward to reading more.
~ Mark

The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.

Austin Kleon.
~ Mark

As an artist you can sit and tinker with stuff forever. You can add and take away but I think that’s kind of the importance of having someone over you saying, “We need this, this is a deadline.” Sometimes those oppositions or those who push and pull are needed because we’ll just sit and tinker forever.

Andre 3000.
~ Mark

Rarely do I have any shittiness that stays shitty. I either resolve it or walk away. Rarely do I let shit linger.

Eddie Murphy.