25 great quotes that didn’t make it into Steal Like An Artist.
Lots of stuff I think y’all will dig. Steal is a kind of sequel to Newspaper Blackout, on sale now!
Why erase the works of other writers? The philosophical answer is that poets, as Wordsworth defines them, are “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.” The more practical answer: compared to writing, erasing feels easy. But I am here to convince you: to erase is to write, style is the consequence of the writer’s omissions, and the writer is always plural. To erase is to leave something else behind.
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| — | Jeannie Vanasco |
The sender of a message can never fully know his recipient’s mental code book…. Every poem is a message, different for every reader.
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| — | James Gleick, The Information (via austinkleon) |
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it.
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| — | Mortimer Adler & Charles van Doren on marginalia, in How To Read A Book (via Brain Pickings) |
Everyone wants to be sincere, an individual. But how would you describe an idea, if you didn’t have words already?
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| — | Ariel Pink |
My favorite compliment that I got from a writer early on was, ‘you leave out all the right things.’
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| — | Amy Hempel |
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
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| — | Jim Jarmusch |
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
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| — | T.S. Eliot, 1920, The Sacred Wood |
