A poem is nonetheless present from the conception, from the first germ of it crossing the mind—it must be scratched for and exhumed. There is an element of timelessness. The leading atomic scientist in Australia agreed with me the other day that time does not really exist. The finished poem is present before it is… Continue reading Robert Graves
Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s… Continue reading David Foster Wallace
I have my dark days, and I have my days of hope about all of it, but to be honest, those days of hope are a bit of a forced hope. — Kip Moore, from “Kip Moore: Moore Authenticity” by Tricia Despres, American Songwriter (vol. 36, no. 3, March / April 2021)
I love kissing. If I could kiss all day, I would. I can’t stop thinking about kissing. I like kissing more than sex because there’s no end to it. You can kiss forever. You can kiss yourself into oblivion. You can kiss all over the body. You can kiss yourself to sleep. And when you… Continue reading Sufjan Stevens
We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world. — David Foster Wallace, interview in Whiskey Island, Spring, 1993.
I have always thought that the truth of fiction is more profound, more charged with meaning than everyday reality. Realism […] falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it, it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: Love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and… Continue reading Eugène Ionesco
Thinking about the past is inherently sentimental–one always wishes things had been more of the same, less of the same, or partially or altogether otherwise, if only because we somehow believe the past, our past, still cares for us, as we care for it. This differs it from thinking about the desert, which we know… Continue reading Charles Wright
Solitude is necessary not only for writing but for love as such. I strongly believe only in love where you can preserve your own solitude. Rainer Maria Rilke has a beautiful definition of such kind of love, when he says that love consists in this: “that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”… Continue reading Srećko Horvat
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion. — Barry Lopez, Poets and Writers interview, March/April, 1994
Seven years of sleeplessness, and my vision of things is the result of this years-long wakefulness. I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy. — Emil M. Cioran, from “Novelist And Philosopher of Despair” (Eric Pace, June 22, 1995, The NeSeven years of… Continue reading Emil M. Cioran
The Vale of Soul-Making 