Salter

No one I know of has ever been able to definitively say what a short story is or should be, what distinguishes it from an anecdote or an account-Mishima’s “Patriotism” is an account but with a power that dismisses definitions - or a piece of description. I like stories that keep you reading until the line that makes it a story, as in, say, Carver’s “Night School” when [the narrator’s wife] says, “That’s only writing…. Being betrayed by somebody in your own family, there’s a real nightmare for you.” Suddenly all of it, solid, with a click like steel, falls into place.

James Salter

Chess

I like the moment when I break a man's ego

bobby fischer

A spaniel, a bulldog or a retriever?

I just draw what's interesting to me, and then I paint it. Rows of houses, orchard acres, lines of tree trunks, could be anything. I can take a bowl of fruit and turn it into a life and death drama. Women are power figures, so I depict them that way. I can find people to paint in mobile home communities. I could paint bourgeois people too. I'm not trying to make social comment or fulfill somebody's vision and I can find subject matter anywhere. I guess in some way that comes out of the folk world that I came up in.

Say you wake up in a hotel room in Wichita and look out the window. A little girl is walking along the train tracks dragging a big statue of Buddha in a wooden wagon with a three-legged dog following behind. Do you reach for your guitar or your drawing pad?

Oh wow. It would depend on a lot of things. The environment mostly; like what kind of day is it. Is it a cloudless blue-gray sky or does it look like rain? A little girl dragging a wagon with a statue in it? I'd probably put that in last. The three-legged dog - what type? A spaniel, a bulldog, a retriever? That would make a difference. I'd have to think about that. Depends what angle I'm seeing it all from. Second floor, third floor, eighth floor. I don't know. Maybe I'd want to go down there. The train tracks too. I'd have to find a way to connect it all up. I guess I would be thinking about if this was an omen or a harbinger of something.

Dylan on his art, 2009.

The furniture of espionage

There has to be a beginning, a middle and an end. In the authentic world, almost no espionage case is ever resolved, because you don't want it to be resolved. You want the man or the woman to stay in place, to continue working for you. If he or she loses her effectiveness, you fade the person out and life goes on. Now, that doesn't make a story — that's "the cat sat on the mat." I have to tell "the cat sat on the dog's mat." I have to produce the tension, the danger, and so on. The disciplines of storytelling require that I shape, out of the monotony and everyday life of espionage, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's already contrary to the reality.

Then, I have to introduce levels of intelligence on both sides and in each protagonist, which very probably do not pertain. I have to introduce levels of moral doubt, self-doubt, which may not pertain. I mean a guy who just takes 10,000 bucks to go and do something probably is not asking whether he can reconcile this to his maker. But in my books, he has to.

So I use the furniture of espionage to amuse the reader, to make the reader listen to me, because most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.

John le Carre

Generations

I never subscribed to the bumper-sticker sentiment that when you’re leaving New York you’re going nowhere, a conceit now rendered ridiculous by the ascendancy of cities like Shanghai, Moscow, Mumbai, and Berlin. New York seems to be constantly proclaiming itself, constantly burnishing its own myths, compulsively reassuring itself of its supremacy, an insecurity one would have thought unnecessary in a great city. In the end, tough, gritty New York is the most sentimental of places, at least when it comes to itself.

But still, of course, a great city, and while I may have been fortunate to have experienced it at a time when the balance between the sheer terror of daily life and the excitement of living in a newly resurgent downtown was perfectly calibrated—getting mugged at five in the morning not quite as bad if it was walking home from watching the Talking Heads at the Mudd Club — I’m sure there is a whole generation in Greenpoint or Red Hook busy stacking up its own store of memories. Greenpoint or Red Hook, perhaps, but not Manhattan, where the rich and richer have completed their rout of most of what was different or interesting, leaving only a few pockets of sad and rapidly aging hipsters — a generation so obsessed with looking good that they forgot to actually do anything. There they are, freelancing away in Starbucks—Web designers, graphic artists, unpublished photographers (and, you have to wonder, why are they all so, well, … visual?)—unpoliticized, unangry, uninterested. Some apparently feel quite strongly about wearing fur, others about the virtues of the vegan life (and don’t get them started on Tibet), and all have seen every film made in the last 20 years. Soon they will all be living in upstate New York, in their late 30s and 40s, looking really good, with exquisitely dressed accessory children, driving a perfectly beaten up pick-up truck and convincing themselves that they are there out of principled rejection of city life rather than failure to land that big ad campaign. True, perhaps, but hardly their fault. While it’s always better to be young (age having nothing to be said for it, failing to confer even wisdom), the hipster generation got a raw deal. Impossible any more to shock, impossible to rebel, impossible to create anything not immediately appropriated by commercial interests, it was a generation destined to live in the long shadow of candle-waving boomers and desperately hip, dope-smoking parents. That would have driven anyone into Starbucks or the Catskills. You also have to wonder, when did the 60s become the template for youth, when did this become the generation by which all others are measured? If I wasn’t one of them, I couldn’t wait for the bastards to all die off.

Brian McNally

Memories

For, if our memories do indeed belong to us, they do so after the fashion of those country properties which have some little hidden gates of which we ourselves are often unaware, and which someone in the neighbourhood opens for us, so that from one direction at least which is new to us, we find ourselves back in our own house.

The Fugitive Proust

Piloting an L-1011 into O'Hare

Yes writing can be complicated, exhausting, isolating, abstracting, boring, dulling, briefly exhilarating; it can be made to be grueling and demoralizing. And occasionally it can produce rewards. But it's never as hard as, say, piloting an L-1011 into O'Hare on a snowy night in January, or doing brain surgery when you have to stand up for ten hours straight, and once you start you can't just stop. If you're a writer, you can stop anywhere, any time, and no one will care or ever know. Plus, the results might be better if you do.

Richard Ford Goofing off while the Muse recharges

Noir love

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me and I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

Bogart in In a Lonely Place

Inside stitches

"The book is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythm."

E M Forster on Proust.

Zeus in armor

Bob Dylan on first hearing a Robert Johnson record in 1961.

He seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor... someone playing for an audience only he could see, one off in the future.

Chronicles. Vol. 1

Jack

A woman is beautiful
but

you have to swing
and swing and swing
and swing like
a handkerchief in the
wind

Jack Kerouac from Pomes All Sizes

"Cautious culture"

"I'm exploring something that has nothing to do with race or gender. I'm the crazy girl on the end of that chain. I'm the one who felt I was losing control of my mind and my body because I was not tethered to anyone. And I needed to be snapped back. I needed my father, who died at 49 of a heart attack, to tell me, "It's gonna be OK, and you're not alone. Everybody goes crazy at certain times in their life. You're entitled to some happiness, you're entitled to some unconditional love. And it will never stop. You will constantly be getting punched in the gut, being exploited, being judged."

So I think it's foolish to immediately jump to sexism because of the imagery. But I will give them this: I'm asking for it. I guess I could have chosen some other way to do it. But, look, you can't do a movie about the blues and not explore biblical imagery and Southern iconography. And it is an obvious flip to see that black man with a white woman on the end of a chain, walking with her in his beautiful bean field, with her in those white cotton panties and a crop top with a Confederate flag and an American flag on it. I can't believe people are thinking this is, like, a documentary -- that this goes on in the South every day.

It doesn't, but "Tobacco Road" doesn't happen every day in the South, either. "Baby Doll," the Elia Kazan movie, doesn't happen every day either. But we give those movies a pass. We're in a very cautious culture, and to some extent I think that means we've created a bigger divide."

Black Snake Moan's director Craig Brewer.