Well, if you are a writer, or would hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.
Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events. These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows.
My favorite tune was “’Tain’t No Sin, To Take Off Your Skin, and Dance Around in Your Bones.
I fell into my typewriter with it and came up with a brand-new, absolutely original tale, which had been lurking under my skin since I first drew a skull and crossbones, aged six.
I remembered five o’clock in the morning, predawn arrivals of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and all the animals parading by before sunrise, heading for the empty meadows where the great tents would rise like incredible mushrooms.
We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it’s here.
Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.
It was an evening in summer upon the placid and temperate planet Mars. Up and down green wine canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted. In.
I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.
Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband or wife.
Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?” “Since always.” “Since now learn otherwise.
What killed them?” Hathaway said simply, “Chicken pox.
Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called.
If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won.
She could feel the mirrors waiting for her in each room much the same as you felt, without opening your eyes, that the first snow of winter has just fallen outside your window.
Everything I’ve ever done was done with excitement, because I wanted to do it, because I loved doing it.
If it rubs off, it means I’m in love.
They contain half the damning truths I suspected at midnight, and half of the saving truths I re-found next noon.
It has nothing to do with pay. Either you love what you are doing or... Look, I wrote for years, and I wasn’t paid. My love carried me through all those years.
You don’t have to move, do you? On occasion, maybe, like tonight. But mostly you travel back and forth between your ears.