A Quote by Alexandra Stoddard
Being a decorator allowed me to see what about people's environments made them happy. And what things they could do to have more light and color and joy in their daily lives.
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I always look at magazines and wind up standing there like, "Whose house looks like this? Who lives this way?" I never can understand what the point of view is. The only thing you can really do, being a decorator, is put an educated client towards what it is they don't know about. The dialogue between a client and a decorator should be more about, "Let me help you get to the point where you can find a comfortable place to live and be exposed to things," the way that an art consultant exposes a person who wants to buy art to art, instead of inflicting good taste upon them.
Painting from life was incredibly important for me because it allowed me to train my eyes to see everything that is there. But I realized early on that painting from life wasn't something that I was all that invested in. I was always more interested in the painting than I was the people. For me, removing that as a compulsion offered me a lot more freedom to actually paint and think about color, form, movement, and light.
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.
I made a list of the happiest periods in my life, and I realized that none of them involved money. I realized that building stuff and being creative and inventive made me happy. Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy. Trick-or-treating in middle school with a group of my closest friends made me happy. Eating a baked potato after a swim meet made me happy. Pickles made me happy.
I do less of that stuff now because I figured out that when I was writing things I didn't care about, it made me angry and depressed, so I turned my focus to what does make me happy, and also I recognized that one of the things that gives me great happiness is teaching creative writing, and so I could write profiles of professional golfers or I could be a professor. Being a professor made me much happier.
One of the first cassette tapes I ever purchased was the Rambo III score. I was not allowed to see Rambo, but my mom would allow me to buy the music, so I would listen to that score over and over and imagine the movie. But those limitations and not being able to access those things made me so much more excited about them.
What I found so captivating about the idea of being a writer was having the ability to write down all these things I made up in my head so other people could see them.
The amazing thing about cross-country is that they don't run indoors - I could put them in extraordinary environments. And it's kind of uniquely cinematic in that way, to be able to commit to the screen some things that people don't get to see too often.
150 years ago in [Charles] Dickens's time there was at least a sense of craft. So some of the things people had inside of them, they had the possibility of expressing in the making of things - even in a daily way with their clothes or their food. People made a good deal of both themselves. Now our daily lives are almost all consumption. Craft plays a tiny role.
Everybody really knows what to do to have his life filled with joy. What is it? Quit hating people; start loving them. Quit being mad at people; start liking them. Quit doing wrong; quit being filled with fear. Quit thinking about yourself and go out and do something for other people. Everybody knows what you have to do to be happy. But the wisdom of the test lies in the final words: "If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them."
We could all do with a bit more joy in our lives couldn't we? The wonderful thing is that when we start spreading joy, we begin to actually experience more joy in our lives too!
I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.
In the daily lives of most men and women, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thought of the possessions that others may take from them, than of the joy that they might create in their own lives and in the lives with which they come in contact. It is not so that life should be lived.
Taking up magic was a distraction from my sexuality. There is that 1970s cliche of the gay man as hairdresser, interior decorator, fashionista... and all of those things are about arranging surfaces in a very dazzling way - and magic is all about how you arrange surfaces. I got very good at deflecting people from things I didn't want them to see.
I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.
We have to rethink the way we light our cities. We have to think again about light as a default solution. Why are all these motorways permanently lit? Is it really needed? Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also benefit from darkness? Can we be more gentle with light?
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