A Quote by Italo Calvino
The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
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We inhabit an obscure planet, in an obscure galaxy, around an obscure sun, but on the other hand, modern human society represents one of the most complex things we know.
Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.
It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.
With knot of one, the spell's begun. With knot of two, the spell be true. With knot of three, the spell is free. With knot of four, the power is stored. With knot of five, the spell with thrive. With knot of six, this spell I fix.
The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around.
It is possible for the most obscure person in a church, with a heart right toward God, to exercise as much power for the evangelization of the world, as it is for those who stand in the most prominent positions.
My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I sing about what a holy fool I am, and that although moments in my life are so cruel and relationships can be so cruel I'm still in love with Judas. I still go back again to those evil things.
If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.
When we make films - even 2D films - you're always trying to create this illusion of 3D, anyway. You're trying to create a believable world with characters walking, in and out of the perspective, to create the illusion that there's a world. The desire and drive to create this illusion of three-dimensional space is something that is true about every kind of film because you want the audience to really be experiencing it, first hand. It's a natural extension of the storytelling and the process of filmmaking.
The way you feel is your point of attraction, and so, the Law of Attraction is most understood when you see yourself as a magnet getting more and more of the way you feel. When you feel lonely, you attract more loneliness. When you feel poor, you attract more poverty. When you feel sick, you attract more sickness. When you feel unhappy, you attract more unhappiness. When you feel healthy and vital and alive and prosperous-you attract more of all of those things.
I wouldn't say I'm fixated on describing any kind of relationship whether it is a father and a son, or a family. I don't like it when people say that I'm particularly following the same line or that I'm only interested in family dramas. I'm interested in human relationships. The most intimate, the most delicate, and the most intriguing relationships are those within a family.
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road; But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.
When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.
Former CIA employee Joseph Weisberg's 'An Ordinary Spy' may attract attention for how much it redacts - whether by authorial choice or by CIA design - but its power comes from the growing frustration Weisberg's fictional alter ego feels at a system designed to betray seeming innocents in the most casual and cruel manner possible.
I think human relationships - the whole thing is cruel. It's very difficult.
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