some kind of manifesto:

• ✔ An Apology for Idlers by Robert Louis Stevenson
• ✔ 12 rules for children poetry writers by Chuk http://www.poezia.ru/childmast.php?sid=1 (13th, mentioend later: you must be happy)

6t: R-only (how-to-cheap, film-cheap), E-only (comedy, foreign-country-perspective, multiple perspectives, textbook reviews)

--

"Nothing could ever happen out there in the world with one of my books that could be NEARLY as interesting and transformative as what happens internally while I’m creating it. Alone in a small room, operating at the very furthest edges of my talents, building an imagined world and peopling it with characters who must seem real, and—most challenging—constantly navigating the voices in my mind that want to limit and sabotage me...THAT’S the good stuff. That’s delight. That’s what brings me into being. And knowing, also, that not too long from now, I will sit down and do it all over again...there abides my joy.

What I’m saying is this: Let the creative work you do in this world be its own reward, and you’ll never suffer from deflation when it’s “over”—because it will never BE over. Let your creativity be a river, not a destination and you will know real satisfaction.

Just keep making things." (x)

--

"Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens."

"My own strategy and the thing I advise students to do is to identify things that hurt, that caused pain enough to make you change how you perceive the world. When did it hurt? What made it hurt? Who were the people involved? It can be a modest hurt; it can be a big hurt. A very personal hurt, private, secret. Once you can do that, you can begin to try to create and recreate a story through characters and action."

"Oh, put away your good words / and your bad words. Spit out / your words like stones!"

"There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. …When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance? (here goes the example abt Shakespeare) …Alas and alas! You may take it how you will, but the services of no single individual are indispensable."

"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."

"Read, observe, listen intensely! — as if your life depended upon it."

• "I take an excellent inventory of everything around me, and that is how I write: I am big on observations and details."
• "Good writing is mostly about trusting what you see. Which is very hard"

"do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself."

"A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. …I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways." ("You who judge me, for me you are nothing.")

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."

"Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment."

"Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse."

"I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy." / "What you love to think about, dream about, speak about, learn about and create about is your genius. …The impulses that come from deep within are your guide track to greatness. We want you as is."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

• "I wanted to expand the dialogue to include my point of view." (or: "it's your gift to the world")
• "You want to know for whom, look at your work. Who does it celebrate, who does it put down, who does it think is beautiful, who does it think is ugly, what work are you doing, what study?"
• "Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible."
• "make something beautiful out of something painful"
• "Each of us is so ashamed of his own helplessness and ignorance that he considers it appropriate to communicate only what he thinks others will understand. There are, however, times when somehow we slowly divest ourselves of that shame and begin to speak openly about all the things we do not understand. If I am not wise, then why must I pretend to be? If I am lost, why must I pretend to have ready counsel for my contemporaries? But perhaps the value of communication depends on the acknowledgment of one’s own limits, which, mysteriously, are also limits common to many others; and aren’t these the same limits of a hundred thousand years ago?"
• (about learning from books & "attempt to seize naked experience") "I must offer resistance, check every moment to be sure I am not departing from what I have actually experienced on my own, what I myself have touched. I cannot invent a new language and I use the one I was first taught, but I can distinguish, I hope, between what is mine and what is merely fashionable. I cannot expel from memory the books I have read, their contending theories and philosophies, but I am free to be suspicious and to ask naïve questions instead of joining the chorus which affirms and denies."
• "I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of." (Eco)
• "I believe that in The Name of the Rose, I did, in narrative form, flesh out a certain theory of the comic. The comic as a critical way of undercutting fanaticism. A diabolical shade of suspicion behind every proclamation of truth." (Eco)
• not sure, but sth to think about:
  • "I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness."