A Quote by Susan Sontag
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem.
I think that if you do the best you can in your life, you get your just reward. You sometimes give up a great deal to achieve a plane you're looking for. But if you find that it's important enough, then you do it. You have to decide. Even when you figure you've given up a great deal to get a small amount of something, the pain is only there for a short time. It really goes away. Whatever the quandary, it leaves you.
I have so much going on inside my head in terms of writing, there's such a large space in my life taken up by that. I can't imagine it being taken up by a husband and children and writing, and everything getting its due. I don't believe there is room for all of it. I really don't.
China is never going to be a global model. Western system is really broken in some fundamental ways, but the Chinese system is not going to work either. It is a deeply unfair and immoral system where everything can be taken away from anyone in a split second.
Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.
To remain attached to the temporal, to the changing is to remain within the world of misery because the temporal will be taken away. You have invested so much in it but one day everything is taken away. Then it is natural to feel miserable. Misery is rooted in attachment to the body and bliss is rooted in non-attachment to the body; hence all the great masters have been teaching methods and means of non-attachment, of getting disidentified with the body, with the mind, with everything surrounds you, and of just remaining a pure witness. That's what we are: pure witnessing, pure awareness.
As an artist your trajectory just has to keep going up. the thing that subverts your next body of work is the work you've taken before.
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
The body you're given, the mind you're given, the morality and the hang ups you're given, they're yours. Deal with it.
You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!
The only people who think writing is easy are people who don't write. Writing's a difficult, courageous act. Bravery is required, as well as a great deal of slogging along. A lot of our work is work.
... I had a dream where I was taken to Heaven and brought into a beautiful library. There I was given two golden books that were covered with dust. The Lord told me they were golden treasure that was needed for the Body of Christ to have the knowledge to proceed and succeed in this hour.
My early life has given me a great deal to draw on, certainly - but would I have swapped a happy childhood for the writing? Yes.
I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.
Long ago you may have given up control of your brain and set it on autopilot either because it just felt like too much work. And it is work! But for me, this work was well worth it for the prospect of not waking up sad every day.
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