Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities. . Glen Duncan
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Writing is a struggle against silence. - Carlos Fuentes
  2. Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven. - Walter Benjamin
  3. People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising... - Delphine De Vigan
  4. In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things.... - Madeleine LEngle
  5. For most of the process, nothing but faith, fueled by your own stubbornness, will be pulling you along. The work that you've done on the book so far won't be much comfort, because so much of it will be insufferable crap, until the very last... - Kristin Cashore
More Quotes By Glen Duncan
  1. The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
  2. You can't live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.
  3. Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche's ghostly script?
  4. It’s why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn’t have to look on the lewd aliveness of the living.
  5. Don't bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn't one. Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and...
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