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Creative Consciousness And The Artist
A bricklayer can inhabit the house he builds, more or less, said Sartre, a tailor can wear the suit he has made: a writer cannot be a reader of his own book. A book is what readers put in it…
What we call style happens beyond grammar. It’s not the same saying “there’s the window” as “the window is there.” In one case, space is privileged; in the other, object. All syntax is a conception of the world.
Cortázar used to say that he started his stories without knowing where he was going. Don’t believe him. In his best tales he knew it perfectly, though I didn’t know he knew it.
— Abelardo Castillo, from “Being a writer”
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“The tedious task of writing has to become second nature to you. If you sit down and write quietly the whole day, you’ll have written at least two or three pages, even if it’s a struggle. And if you keep at it, you’ll eventually have a couple hundred pages. I think young people today don’t know the trick of it. They start and want to get to the end right away. When you go mountain climbing, the first thing you’re told is not to look at the peak but to keep your eyes on the ground as you climb…
— Akira Kurosawa
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