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Main Page | On
Writing | On Love | On War | On
Ego | On Science | On Life
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On Art
“As the poets and painters of centuries have tried
to tell us, art is not about the expression of talent or the making of
pretty things. It is the preservation and containment of
soul.”—Thomas Moore
“The quest for transcendence, it’s something we
all live for. When the artist achieves a great creation, all of this
is part of the same drive of life to see itself renewed. It is the
height of individual existence, of uniqueness.”—Yehudi Menuhin,
from Conversations with Menuhin
“[A]rt is a generosity; i.e.,
you tell somebody something not to show off but because you want to
share it with them.”—Brenda Ueland, from If
You Want to Write
“I feel that beauty and femininity are ageless and
can’t be contrived, and glamor—although the manufacturers won’t
like this—cannot be manufactured. Not real glamor, it’s based on
femininity. I think that sexuality is only attractive when it’s
natural and spontaneous…. We are all born sexual creatures, thank
God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural
gift. Art, real art, comes from it—everything.”—Marilyn Monroe
“Curving back within myself, I create again and
again.”—Krishna, from the Bhagavad-Gita
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At Orphanage #3, Shymkent
Photo by Jill Marrone
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On Writing
“Writing practice is kicking ass.”—Natalie Goldberg, from “Wild
Mind: An Interview with Natalie Goldberg”
“I’m not as talented as many
writers, but I worked harder than most. I hate to sound like a
Republican, because I’m not, but there’s no substitute for hard
work. There’s nobody lazier than writers. A lot of writers spend a
lot of time talking about writing.”—Sherman Alexie, from “Not
Just Blowing Smoke”
“If one looks at the first drafts of even the
greatest writers, like Tolstoi and Dostoevski, one sees that literary
art does not come flying like Athena, fully formed, from Zeus’ head.
Indeed, the first-draft stupidity of great writers is a shocking and
comforting thing to see.”—John Gardner, from “What Writers Do”
“I don’t believe the writer should know too
much where he’s going. If he does, he runs into old man
blueprint—old man propaganda.”—James Thurber
“When I’m really working, really writing, I have
the feeling it’s coming from outside of me, through me. An absolute
submission, absolute surrender.”—William Goyen
“(The novelist) must learn to step outside of
himself, see and feel things from every human—and inhuman—point of
view. He must be able to report, with convincing precision, how the
world looks to a child, a young woman, an elderly murderer, or the
governor of Utah. He must learn, by staring intently into the dream he
dreams over the typewriter, to distinguish the subtlest difference
between the speech and feeling of his various characters, himself as
impartial and detached as God, giving all human beings their due and
acknowledging their frailties. Insofar as he pretends not to private
vision but to omniscience, he cannot, as a rule, love some of his
characters and despise others.”—John Gardner, from On Becoming
a Novelist
“Finally, the true novelist is the one who
doesn’t quit. Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga,
or ‘way,’ an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its
benefits are quasi-religious—a changed quality of mind and heart,
satisfactions no non-novelist can understand—and its rigors
generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are
authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are
enough.”—John Gardner, from On Becoming a Novelist
“There is no mystery in the art of writing, but
the miracle by which a living emotion is captured without dying in the
process is a mystery unless one accepts that to translate a living
emotion into words, the emotion must be strong enough to survive the
transplantation, and this means strong roots in the base of our
emotional nature. Only then is writing effective and contagious.”—Anaïs
Nin, from The Novel of the Future
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That
is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand
of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which
we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers,
our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet,
when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of
uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is
no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation,
all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to
discover what is already there.”—Henry Miller
“Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your
night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And
if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question
with a strong, simple ‘I must,’ then build your life in
accordance with this necessity.”—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to
a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell
“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that
many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being
themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the
particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the
man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their
individual lives.”—Thomas Merton, from New
Seeds of Contemplation
“The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.”
—Marge Piercy, from “For the young who want
to” in The Moon Is Always Female
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Photo by Val Fearnside
Photo by Shawn Teigen
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On Love
“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its
deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”—Rainer
Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell
“Love—whether between life-mates, parents and
children, or friends—affirms the loved one for who he or she is. Our
love relationships are not about changing another person to fit the
ideal of ‘love’ our ego constructs, nor are they about rejecting
other persons because, over time, they change, like everything else in
life. Love is being truly present with the loyalty, caring, and
commitment that confirm the interconnectedness of all beings.”—Jean
Smith, from Now!
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Photo by Val Fearnside
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On War
“What difference does it make to the dead, the
orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under
the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or
democracy?”—Mahatma Gandhi, from “Non-Violence in Peace and War”
“We can never obtain peace
in the world if we neglect the inner world and don’t make peace with
ourselves. World peace must develop out of inner peace. Without inner
peace it is impossible to achieve world peace, external peace. Weapons
themselves do not act. They have not come out of the blue. Man has made
them. But even given those weapons, those terrible weapons, they cannot
act by themselves. As long as they are left alone in storage they cannot
do any harm. A human being must use them. Someone must push the button.
Satan, the evil powers, cannot push that button. Human beings must do
it.”—The
Dalai Lama, from The Dalai Lama: A Policy of
Kindness
“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the
brain
Of the sensual
man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the
sky:
There is no such thing as
the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the
police;
We must love one another or
die.”
—W.H. Auden, from
“September 1, 1939”
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On the Ego
“Anyone who can feel sorry for himself in a world
where there’s so much injustice is either an egotist or a fool.”—Lorin
Maazel
“Sitting
astride the senses is a shadowy, phantomlike figure with insatiable
desires and a lust for dominance. His name? Ego, Ego the Magician, and
the deadly tricks he carries up his sleeve are delusive thinking, greed,
and anger. Where he came from no one knows, but he has surely been
around as long as the human mind. This wily and slippery conjurer
deludes us into believing that we can only enjoy the delights of the
senses without pain by delivering ourselves into his hands. Of the many
devices employed by Ego to keep us in his power, none is more effective
than language. The English language is so structured that it demands the
repeated use of the personal pronoun ‘I’
for grammatical nicety and presumed clarity…. All this plays into the
hands of Ego, strengthening our servitude and enlarging our sufferings,
for the more we postulate this I the more we are exposed to Ego’s
never-ending demands.”—Philip Kapleau, from
Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen Keys
“You
might think that if you let go of your ego world, you become passive and
defenseless like some kind of crash dummy and people will take advantage
of you. Or that you might wander around aimlessly in the street without
an agenda. If this were the case, as one contemporary Buddhist master
pointed out, it would be necessary to have enlightenment wards in
hospitals to take care of bruised or socially inoperative buddhas. But
this is not the case. Rather than being inmate types, people who have
become enlightened to any degree are builders of hospitals for other
people. Their intelligence and compassion are relatively unobstructed,
and they tend to become quite active and effective citizens.”—Samuel
Bercholz, from Entering the Stream
“In Buddhist systems, more especially those of
Tibet, the meditation Buddhas appear in two aspects, one peaceful and
the other wrathful. If you are clinging fiercely to your ego and its
little temporal world of sorrows and joys, hanging on for dear life, it
will be the wrathful aspect of the deity that appears. It will seem
terrifying. But the moment your ego yields and gives up, that same
meditation Buddha is experienced as a bestower of bliss.”—Joseph
Campbell
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On Science
“All progress is heresy. My early work in chemistry
was just as unconventional as my recent work in molecular medicine.
Always, I have tried to stick close to nature, stick close to the facts,
but not be constrained by conventional ideas.”—Linus Pauling, quoted
in Science Digest
“As I saw it, a scientific truth was a hypothesis
which might be adequate for the moment but was not to be preserved as an
article of faith for all time.”—Carl Jung, from Memories,
Dreams, Reflections
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On Life
“What is the meaning of human life, or of organic
life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is
there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who
regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is
not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.”—Albert
Einstein, from The World As I See It
“If you’re bored,
then it is you who are boring because you’ve set yourself a certain
narrow frame and you wallow in it.”—Yo Yo Ma
“Self-confidence is not to be
confused with pride. Pride is thinking highly of oneself without good
reason. Self-confidence is knowing that one has the ability to do
something properly and being determined not to give up.”—The
Dalai Lama, from
A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night
“Stubbornness
is just another word for confidence in your ability to get
results.”—Japanese baseball legend Sadaharu Oh
“Friend, hope for the
truth while
you are alive. Jump into experience while
you are alive! What you call ‘salvation’
belongs to the time before death. If you
don’t break your ropes while you are alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?”
—Kabir
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My wife, Val, with Kisa, our cat
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