A Quote by Hisham Matar
Ivan Turgenev's novella 'First Love' is one of the most perfect things ever written.
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The first book ever written in an alphabet was the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And the most important passage was the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever written. It states: "I am the Lord thy God there is no other." The second prohibits us from making images. Thus, there is a profound rejection of any goddess influence and a ban of representative art.
I've always found that the best things I've ever written, or the things I like the most that I've written, are things where it's a pure idea, and you just follow it and put it down and see if it works.
'Envy the Night' was my first stand alone, the first book I'd written in the third person and I loved the feel of that, and it was different but it was also the same. 'So Cold the River,' I knew, was going to be really different, and that's why I thought about doing it as a novella under a pseudonym, because I didn't want to damage my career.
Most of everything I've ever written actually was written on acoustic. 'Do You Feel' was written on electric. 'I'm in You' was written on piano.
Love is sometimes shown in the things you don't say, don't keep track of and don't notice. The greatest kindness is often shown in letting things go. None of us is perfect, but we can all be perfect friends and perfect partners by allowing those that we love to be imperfect. Give those around you the 'break' that you hope the world will give you on your own 'bad day' and you'll never, ever regret it.
But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
I think Mozart's operas 'The Marriage of Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni' are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.
When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance. That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance higher than beauty or love or pity.
Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
I have all of the Apple products. Everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh - 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music.
'Pelleas et Melisande' is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively.
To me, the most perfect screenplay ever written will be one word, when you finally reduce it down to that. Until then, writing will be an imperfect form of communication.
Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.
The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.
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