Sh-h-h-h-h-h-h…….. – Eric Maisel, Deep Writing

 

4'33" - John Cage

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

4′33″ (pronounced Four minutes, thirty-three seconds or, as the composer himself referred to it, Four, thirty-three) is a three-movement composition by American avant-garde composer John Cage (19121992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the 3 movements (The first 30 seconds, the second 2 minutes and 23 seconds and the third 1 minute and 40 seconds). Although commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence", the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Over the years, 4′33″ became Cage's most famous and most controversial composition.
Conceived around 19471948, while the composer was working on Sonatas and Interludes, 4′33″ became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any sounds constitute, or may constitute, music. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, which Cage studied since the late 1940s. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage stated that 4′33″ was, in his opinion, his most important work..

Procrastination station

Don't get it right, just get it written. ~ James Thurber

Me too

What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other. – Manuel Puig

 

There is

There’s a heaven and/There’s a star for you. – Daniel Johnston (Mark Linkous – Sparklehorse)

Try the best you can

Music [or anything creative] is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well. – Martin Gore (Depeche Mode)

(brackets mine)

You can try the best you can
If you try the best you can
The best you can is good enough

You can try the best you can
If you try the best you can
The best you can is good enough  

RIP Harvey Pekar

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy. – Mark Twain

"I'm trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing," he said.
What mattered most to Harvey Pekar was that people appreciate their own latent abilities, the power of the every day. Ordinary life, he liked to say, is pretty complex stuff.

experimental periment mental experi tal, ex al, peri, experiment

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. – John Cheever

Do you think there's a heaven?

I always used to think that Heaven is a place for people who spent their whole life doing good, but it isn’t. God is too merciful and kind to make a decision like that. Heaven is simply a place for people who were genuinely unable to be happy on earth. They told me here that people who kill themselves return to live their life all over again, because the fact that they didn’t like it the first time doesn’t mean they won’t fit in the second time. But the ones who really don’t fit in the world wind up here. They each have their own way of getting to Heaven. – Etgar Keret

Simply the best...

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. – Flannery O’Connor

Fast-typing Fingers of Fury

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. – Isaac Asimov

Name that Greek Poet

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. – Aldous Huxley

It was a dark and stormy night...

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice. – Mark Twain

The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be writers

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. – Albert Camus

I believe the children are our future...

Are those REALLY your words?

If you must write prose and poems

The words you use should be your own

Don't plagiarise or take "on loans"

There's always someone, somewhere

With a big nose, who knows

And who trips you up and laughs

When you fall

Who'll trip you up and laugh

When you fall – Cemetery Gates, The Smiths

Fiction and sense

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. – Tom Clancy

I Feel Bad for the Amises

Writers will happen in the best of families. – Rita Mae Brown

Writing your own Rules

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. – Truman Capote

"And God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends! It's flaccid, sloppy writing."