writing

These days, I have found a mode of writing that is rewarded, and if I go beyond it—which I try to do consistently—I get a salary cut the same day. I’ve seen many writers I know end up losing their edge in this situation. The playful wildness that made them successful gets replaced by increasingly hollow repetition as they struggle to maintain the... See more

Perhaps this is because music trades in mystery, while conversation trades in opinion — that subterranean species of certainty.

nothing is ever useless, and certainly is never lost.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I... See more

Imagination, however, is something else entirely. It is not just the ability to make something new, but the capacity to hold together what is not yet fully known, to maintain contact with ambiguity and to construct meaning in the absence of certainty. It enables the projection of possibilities that cannot yet be tested, modeled or verified.