Karl Ove Knausgaard on the Genius of Ingmar Bergman

Accordingly, Knausgaard seeks to render the waves of boredom and elation, ambition and frustration, intense joy and absentminded occupation that form the rhythms of his days. Above all, he tries to focus his gaze on what means the most to him. Here too it is a matter of acknowledging how he is attached to what he sees, even at the cost of confessin

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Even if you know what it feels like to be completely open to where your curiosity wants you to go, like Grothendieck, it is a fragile state. It often takes considerable work to keep the creative state from collapsing, especially as your work becomes successful and the social expectations mount. When I listen to interviews with creative people or re

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Here are some other techniques people use to access and maintain the zone:

• Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read th

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To build up “a huge archive of thinking and feeling” seems a necessary project for any artist, even without publication as the eventual goal.

Arranging things end to end like this is the first step when you edit a film. In cinema jargon this first version is called the assembly cut, and nobody in their right mind can believe it’ll result in something watchable – or readable if it’s a book. And then, once you’ve overcome the urge to toss the whole thing out, you get down to work, you asse

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The writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner, on the value of writing and journaling:

I had often thought that novelists and poets had a special advantage in learning how to live, their writings providing them with an instrument that most of us were denied. By being able to dramatize their own difficulties they were in a far better position for solvin

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