A Quote by Sybille Bedford

I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand. — © Sybille Bedford
I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand.
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
If you hand an adult a lump of clay, they're likely to respond by fashioning something representative out of the raw material. For the most part, they'll simply forge an object that signifies something "real" in the world, even if that something is as abstract as an emotion or an energy. A child, on the other hand, will just as often produce something totally without semiotic meaning, a shape or a mass that represents nothing that exists outside of their imagination. Or else, they'll eat it or throw it or ignore it, wholesale.
My favorite thing as a performing artist is to get a pile of raw material from a writer who says, 'Will you help me make this real?' There's nothing like starting from scratch.
If you want to be a writer, all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil, and I had a manual typewriter. It doesn't cost money to write. It costs money to make art. So I would just write. I would hand out stories in the classes in high school. And the teacher would say, "Whatever you do, don't become a writer."
We're living in a time when the world has suddenly discovered India because it's run out of raw material for its imagination. The raw materials for imagination are inexhaustible here.
And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.
RAW is very forgiving. I was photographing a farm woman in Ecuador cooking over a small fire and my fill flash didn't go off a few times. I was about to delete the RAW files but decided to play with the curves first because I like the composition. It turned out that the image, although underexposed by two stops, was better than the fill-flashed images because the fire was the only source of illumination and it looked more real.
Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.
When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years ? whether it is being the writer or being the lover ? turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.
Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.
I can make dough in a machine faster than I can make it by hand, but I want to make it by hand, because I want to remember the way it feels. It's so important for me to make it by hand - whether it's a pasta dough or a pâte brisée. You become involved in it. You become personal with it. For me it's such a wonderful way to get satisfaction and gratification when I'm cooking.
I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something--or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.
Duct tape is like that. It's a building block. You can make a rope out of it, you can make a cloth out of it. And because it sticks to stuff it's even more powerful. It's like an uber-material because of the versatility of a sticky fiber.
... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.
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