Mary Oliver on the spellbinding power of RHYTHM...

via BrainPickings

Susan Sontag on STORYTELLING...

via BrainPickings :

Love words. Agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

Be serious. Never be cynical. Which doesn’t preclude being funny.

A great writer of fiction both creates — through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms — a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in theirworlds: call that history, society, what you will.

The primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) … Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature — the matchless storyteller.

To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate — and, therefore, improve — our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

Every writer of fiction wants to tell many stories, but we know that we can’t tell all the stories — certainly not simultaneously. We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence … in that time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story).

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once … and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The work of the novelist is to enliven time, as it is to animate space.

Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape. Alternatives to the plot ought to be felt up to the last moment. These alternatives constitute the potential for disorder (and therefore of suspense) in the story’s unfolding.

Endings in a novel confer a kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is not death and discover exactly where we are in relation to the events leading to a conclusion.

The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an ending. And an ending that satisfies is one that excludes. Whatever fails to connect with the story’s closing pattern of illumination the writer assumes can be safely left out of the account.

A novel is a world with borders. For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders. One could describe the story’s end as a point of magical convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a fixed position from which the reader sees how initially disparate things finally belong together.

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in.

”Till then, then.”

5 to 7

Danny Boyle On Lessons Learned (I)

”I say sort of semi-controversially or provocatively, your first film is your best film, always, because it has that innocence about it, about not knowing what you’re doing.”


”I began to learn how to contradict film culture just in the way films are made. I got much more into doing it in what you would call an unprofessional way. I’m not a big fan of the tautly professional films that do things ‘the right way.’ I think it’s not a great spur to creativity sometimes.”

”You learn sometimes that the most obvious fucking thing is the thing we need. And don’t try to avoid it, because sometimes you get all wrapped up in subtlety, but sometimes it’s the most obvious thing that you need to do.”

”The precision you have to bring is migraine-inducing, and the patience you have to have while you wait for CG. If I ever did another movie like that, I would take a break during editing. Editing is such an organic thing; you keep editing, even though you should have stopped. What you’re really doing is waiting for these CG effects to arrive and we should have taken six months off. Because what you’re doing is cutting the film and there are huge swaths of it you haven’t got. But the fact that they’re not there affects how you cut after it, so actually you’re distorting the film. I’d certainly advise anyone about big CG to build in a break.”

”[...] in reality, making a film, if you just make the facts, it doesn’t necessarily work and it doesn’t look truthful. And it’s because something else happens in art and film, which is that you have to represent truth rather than photograph it.”

”I learned that the dark stuff is always there. You might be doing the wholesome family entertainment as your day job, but at night the dark stuff is still there."

David Fincher's cool 1986 shit

"There is no perfect... There will always be struggle... You just have to pick who you want to struggle with."