A Quote by Dennis Lehane

Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job. — © Dennis Lehane
Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.
It is important to do what you don't know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.
When I make music I try to be as honest as I can to how I experience the world. Like how you arrange a piece of music formally. I tend to observe a lot of chaos or whatever, the fragmentation and melancholy. That's the filter I synthesize my world view with. If I didn't formally have that chaos and it was really linear, it would make my skin crawl.
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.
Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.
When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.
The only reason I do anything is that I just love writing songs. If I write songs, I feel good about it for days and that's the only reason I do it and it is the only reason I'm in a band. And it's the touring aspect, getting out there, seeing the world, meeting people. It's all I ever really wanted, you know. And it's kind of ever since I was fourteen, I was compelled to do it. I just don't really know what it is or why it is.
The only reason you even start a band is so you can hang out with your friends all the time, but somewhere along the line, it just ends up becoming a job. You were doing it because you were like, 'I never want to have to get a job,' then all of a sudden it becomes the biggest job you could ever imagine.
On every job you learn, on every job you should be looking to learn and every decision you make on the jobs you take, they should always try in some way, even if not in a huge way, they should in some way stretch you.
I try to make statements that aren't broad because that doesn't make for good writing. I don't get commentary as my job, because I'm not very good at that. The way I do it is by writing songs, and I have to be small; I have to make the stories a bit personal.
Coaches should realize that the only way to conquer drudgery is by getting through it as efficiently as they can. A dull job slackly done becomes twice as dull, whereas a dull job performed as efficiently as possible becomes half as dull. Effort appears to be the main art of living.
The tonal is the sense of place. It is order and reason in a world of chaos.
It is not expected of critics that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I've experienced, what I've felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On the other hand, I don't want it to be just a cathartic experience, an outpouring of grief or whatever it is.
Whether it's writing a monologue or writing standup or writing a screenplay or writing a play, I think staying involved in the creation of your own work empowers you in a way, even if you don't ever do it. It gives you a sense of ownership and a sense of purpose, which I think as an actor is really important.
I focus on the task and try and do it as best we can. And we're constantly evolving it, because it's my way of trying to make sense of all these ambivalent feelings I have.
For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.
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