Quotes by and About Authors?

I like Don DeLillo as well...and while we are on the topic of writers who deal with shocking things America does not want to face, I found this synopsis of Benjamin Weissman's short story 'Dear Dead Person', which inspired an art exhibit. The book is indeed a shocking collection of stories.

"The title of the exhibition Dear Dead Person refers to a short story by the author and artist Benjamin Weissman. At a shotgun-rapid three pages, Dear Dead Person takes the form of a stilted, formal letter to the victim of a car accident - whose broken body proves to be the highlight of a family's summer vacation. In a gesture of straight-faced gratitude, the letter writer isolates the death as a defining vector in the vacation - just as the death becomes the vector of our own reading enjoyment. The artists selected for this exhibition all have described, either in part or in whole, an echo of that same vector, a thank-you letter that answers our own collective, cultural rubbernecking."

Oh goody, D'art!! I'll take out my notebooks and drive you crazy!!

Dimitri Nabokov, speaking of his father: "He has had time to tell me, one sunny day on a Swiss mountain, that his creative process as simple: writing was like developing an exposed film stored in one's mind. And he was happy, for almost all the film had been developed...."

That's from Antaeus, a lit journal which no longer exists, and life is almost not worth living without it...

Thanks for sharing those, Tartarin. I really liked the one about the Weissman story. I'll have to look for that.

I don't have my little notebooks with me now, the ones where I write these down. I'll remember to bring it tomorrow...

Apropos of Weissman (well, not really, but Cav's post reminded me), have you ever read the little book of short stories by a South African writer whose name will come back to me the moment I turn this machine off (electric storms on the way) -- a little book called "Dating Your Mom"?

Hmm, don't know that one Tartarin, worth a read I suspect?

Cav, I meant to thank YOU for sharing the Weissman story!

No problem, now if only I could actually find the book...he has a nice self-penned bio at the beginning...I'll be back....

Cav -- Worth a quick look in the bookstore before buying!!

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

--Don DeLillo, from the 1988 interview with Ann Arensberg

Ab-so-lute-ly, Don! Other artists too. How annoying for people around them who have to put up with the constant questioning. Give me a margin and I'll settle there...

Is it okay to quote Pete Seeger -- well, Seeger quoting his father?

"The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there."

A good one from Pete (or his dad)!

One more from DeLillo, then I'll step aside. But I love this one:

"The important thing about the paranoia in my characters is that it operates as a form of religious awe."

Yes, that's particularly apt.

Don't know how familiar many people are with Bruce Chatwin and particularly his book "Songlines," from which I take this:

"What could be done for the Aboriginals was to preserve their most essential liberty: the liberty to remain poor, or, the space in which to be poor if they wished to be poor..."

There was an interview on WNYC a while back with Max Schell, the actor and intellectual. He was close to Joseph Albers, the artist, who also wrote and and who wrote the following poem (roughly translated by Schell from the German):

Calm down. Whatever happens
Happens without you.

Albers also wrote a poem which went something like this:

Easy -- to know
that diamonds -- are precious
Good -- to learn
that rubies -- have depth
But more -- to see
that pebbles -- are miraculous.

And from Peter Handke, in Across, about the creative process and becoming centered:

"Now I had time. Facts and questions crystallized. This having-time wasn't a feeling; it was a resolution: the resolution of all my contradictory feelings. It was a jolt and a widening; disengagement and devotion; defenselessness and the ability to resist; quiescence and enterprise. Its occurrence was rare. Perhaps what is commonly called a 'state of grace' should be called a 'state of having time.' It has its counterpart in a traditional paraphrase of the threshold concept as a 'transition between privation and riches.' In a state of having-time, a murmur spread over the countryside, colors shone, grasses trembled, moss cushions puffed up..."

I like those, Tartarin! Handke is someone I tried to read long before I was capable of appreciating him. The title was "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" if memory serves.

Do you have a title of his to recommend?

Here's an uplifting message from Samuel Beckett--advice he gave to a young writer:

"Despair young, and never look back."