A Quote by Garrison Keillor
I don't associate work with feelings of satisfaction. Rather, guilt, frustration, and resentment of people who write better than I do.
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It feels much nobler to feel guilty than resentful, and it takes more courage to express resentment than guilt. With expressing guilt you expect to pacify your opponent; with expressing resentment you might stir up hostility in him.
When I get out across the country and listen to people, the resentment that I see and the frustration that I see is that we have a generation of people who are fairly convinced that their kids are not going to have a better quality of life or a better future than they will.
Monsters, among other brutes, are the ones without guilt feelings. Perhaps Hitler did not have any, or Himmler, or Stalin. Maybe Mafia bosses do not have any guilt feelings either, or maybe their remains are just well hidden in the cellar. Even aborted guilt feelings...All men need guilt feelings.
Raw emotions - anger, frustration, bitterness, resentment - are the feelings we tend to hide from people we want to impress but spew on those we love the most.
People who are prone to guilt tend to work harder and perform better than people who are not guilt-prone, and are perceived to be more capable leaders.
We are commanded to love God with all our strength, heart, mind and soul and our neighbor in the same way God loves us - it is the same love flowing between God and the soul - the soul and its neighbor. It is difficult, but the burden of the cross is light compared to the cross of uncontrolled emotions, anger, insistence on one's own opinion, the frustration of trying to change others rather than being changed oneself, resentment, regrets and guilt. Accepting the present moment like Jesus did is certainly a lighter burden.
Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.
You'd better discover a more important motive than publication for your work or else you'll go crazy. My sense is that you'll be writers only if you are convinced that to write is something for which there is no substitute in your life. You must therefore be ambitious for your work rather than for its promotion. The good news here is that if you assign secondary importance to publishing and primary to writing itself, you will write better, and will thus increase your odds of getting publishing.
A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.
Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.
When we hold onto the negative in ourselves it comes with endless guilt. We hold onto a lifetime of floating visions and regrets about what we should have done or should have become. Conscience recognizes wrong and tries to atone. But guilt turns into resentment. Conscience brings us closer to each other; guilt drives us apart. Create a new feeling. Every time guilt settles in your stomach, write "I forgive" on a piece of paper. Send it up the chimney, tear it up and flush it, put it in the garbage. Don't eat it.
I think I'm succinct to the point of trying to write the two-word novel. Editing my work almost never means taking anything out but rather adding, because I'm always stripping down. I tend to under-write rather than over-write.
I think people who don't work don't really have interesting and meaningful lives. More than anything, it hurts them. When you're born rich, people just associate you with what you've been given, but the truth is every individual feels better when you create something on your own. Everyone takes pride in the work they do.
You can draw a line between what I'm interested in and what I'm not interested in. On one side you can name Dylan and Lennon, who observe the world and have feelings, and write songs directly from those feelings. On the vapid side you have pop groups who need material and write songs to fill the hole, rather than getting somebody else.
I work to promote the idea of sustainable capitalism driven by long-term considerations rather than quarterly profits, which seeks to better people's lives and the planet rather than destroy them.
I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.
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