On writing
The Best Essay
paulgraham.com
There’s a wonderful letter Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander about the meaning of grace, how grace is when you make the least number of movements between two points – and that type of athletic prose has always appealed to me, coupled with light-handedness and restraint. Elegance, to me, is writing just enough. And, as James Baldwin said, in
... See more“Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance,—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, or rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the best, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it, the round
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Annie
Books are disruptors. Books are questions. I’m not talking about How To Manuals that pretend to give us answers. I’m talking about the noisy row that breaks out in our heads when we have to think past ourselves
Books Because...
Jeanette
We are a wordy species. Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on.
Ursula K. Le Guin — ‘The Operating Instructions’
“But how, if you are neither Zulu warrior nor Aztec maiden, do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning? — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
I can imagine the idea that songwriters feel they are sometimes in receipt of mystical gifts rubs some people up the wrong way for being too aggrandising and too self-important - I get it, because, in many ways, I think of songwriting as low art. That’s not to say it’s not meaningful and complex, but it’s not ancient monument stuff. I obviously... See more
Laura Marling • The Tarot of Songwriting 09 - The Hermit
“The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide tot he country we’re visiting, life.”
Ursula K. Le Guin — ‘The Operating Instructions’