A Quote by Romain Gary
I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.
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When I started writing, I didn't have the common sense to use a pseudonym, so I write under my own name. If I did have a pen name, though, it would be something very historical - something that sounds very sort of Regency... Sophia something.
I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.
I came from nothing. My mother was a single mother in the streets. She did everything she could do. Me and my brother experienced a lot on our own and with me knowing that feeling, I didn't want others to have that feeling, so that's why I fight for the streets. I'm making my own lane and staying true to myself, 'cause at the end of the day, you can't ban the truth.
I would ... go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. ... Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. ... If there were woman all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.
Rick Rubin said, well, I don't know that we will sell records. He said, I would like you to go with me and sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart's content everything you ever wanted to record. I said, that sounds good to me. So I did that. And day after day, three weeks, I sang for him.
But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.
The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.
The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalise my life. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym, and since there's an abundance of anagrams in the novel, the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my name? Hence, Shawn Haigins.
Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Their advice would have enabled me to benefit from the ten years of my life I totally wasted waiting for inspiration.
I'm specifically referring to this certain feeling of sadness, fear, and helplessness that descended on me at the Mexico City protest a day or two after the Narvarte murders. Many of us have grown familiar with that feeling. Every few weeks or so it seems we're hit with some new crime or some new corruption scandal that isn't quite the same as a massacre, but that spawns a feeling of futility and despair in its own way.
She glared at me like she was about to punch me, but then she did something that surprised me even more. She kissed me. "Be careful seaweed brain." She said putting on her invisible cap and disappearing. I probably would have sat there all day, trying to remember my name, but then the sea demons came.
I suffered a lot when I tried to make sanitary napkins and promote the idea. My family - including my mother and wife - deserted me. Villagers even tied me to a tree and beat me. But after seeing me successful now, they come and say that they all knew that I would become famous one day.
I define success a little differently. My dream from day one was to act and stand on my own two feet. I'm literally living my dream after struggling really hard to get here and that in itself is success to me.
Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.
I appreciate your giving my book -- and in no small way, me -- a chance. To thank you, I really wanted to acknowledge all of you in the book. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough room for each name. So I've put in a code name that stands for all of you reading this book. The name is 'Mom.' It will be our little secret. So when you see 'Mom' in the acknowledgments, you'll know I'm really talking about you. And don't let my mother try to tell you otherwise.
My last name is Szekely. Sounds like Saykay. When I was a little kid I had an instructor in camp who called me Shnizneckely. He would make fun of my name and it hurt my feelings because I was a little pussy and I cried. He said, 'Well, how do you say it?' I said, Seekay. So he wrote 'C.K' on my jersey and everything. He made my name 'C.K' and I just stuck with it.
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