Category: quotes

I formulated the real recipe for writing a computer-made bestseller:

First of all you need a computer, obviously, which is an intelligent machine that thinks for you. This would be a definite advantage for many people. All you need is a program of a few lines; even a child could do it. Then one feeds into the computer the content of a hundred or so novels, scientific works, the Bible, the Koran, and a bunch of telephone directories (very useful for characters’ names). Say, something like 120,000 pages. After this, using another program, you randomize; in other words, you mix all those texts together, making some adjustments – for instance, eliminating all the e’s – in order to have not only a novel but a Perec-like lipogram. At this point, you click on “Print,” and, since you have eliminated all the e’s, what comes out is something less than 120,000 pages.

After you have read them carefully several times, underlining the most significant passages, you take them to an incinerator.

Then you simply sit under a tree, with a piece of charcoal and good-quality drawing paper in hand, and, allowing your mind to wander, you write down two lines – for instance: “The moon is high in the sky /The wood rustles.” Maybe what emerges initially is not a novel, but rather a Japanese haiku.

Nevertheless, the important thing is to get started.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG NOVELIST, Umberto Eco (Amazon)

Previously – Filtered for: Umberto Eco

…time is always short despite the unvarying task of burying mortal remains or consigning them to the flames; the long-faced gravediggers chatted as they got drunk, they talked about the Banquet, which would take place soon, in three months, in the spring, as it had been every year since the creation of the world, where they would have a few laughs, drink dry and eat hard, and for three days there would be no corpses, because, as is well known, no-one ever dies during the Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, for this is the Grim Reaper’s gift to the Guild, these three days’ repose, these revelries far from death are the Christmas of the baleful, the feast of Saint Nicholas for the men with long faces.

THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGGER’S GUILD, Mathias Enard

There’s a species of ant that will sit humbly before an anthill. Begging for small gifts. When an ant steps out to hand over just such a gift, the apparently supplicant one—in reality, willing to conquer—tears off its head. The heads of foreign ants are its food. In zoology, it is called FORMICA DECAPITANS, the ant which decapitates.

RUSSIA CONTAINER, Alexander Kluge

the pen goes on the attack against the innocent paper:

THE BOOKS OF JACOB, Olga Tokarczuk trans. Jennifer Croft

Once swallowed, the piece of paper lodges in her oesophagus near her heart. Saliva-soaked. The specially prepared black ink dissolves slowly now, the letters losing their shapes. Within the human body, the word splits in two: substance and essence. When the former goes, the latter, formlessly abiding, may be absorbed into the body’s tissues, since essences always seek carriers in matter – even if this is to be the cause of many misfortunes.

THE BOOKS OF JACOB, Olga Tokarczuk trans. Jennifer Croft. And this is the first paragraph of the book. An utterly astonishing way to start a novel. Put the bar waaaaay up high there right at the start of a thousand-page novel. Damn.

He hardly realised that he was going down, falling, the green water rocking him and the sharp edges of the rocks had already torn him apart. Fossil lances.

I AM THE BROTHER OF XX, Fleur Jaeggy trans. Gini Alhadeff

FOR WITTGENSTEIN, this new program was also reflected in the formal shape of his philosophizing. He was no longer concerned with pouring his own thought into the rigid, hierarchically structured, and rigorously demonstrative form of a treatise. His philosophizing had much more in common with the genre of the commonplace book or the notes of a flâneur in equal measure astounded and fascinated by detail. Wittgenstein set off on this path in 1929. And by consistently following it, he completed his Philosophical Investigations in 1945. It is a collection, as he writes in the preface, of remarks “like a number of sketches of landscapes that were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.” Travel pictures, then, thought-pictures, produced in the course of an exploration of the diversity of human speech itself: “The same points or almost the same points,” Wittgenstein goes on, almost in the spirit of Benjamin the flâneur, “were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made … so that you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album.”

TIME OF THE MAGICIANS

For some reason, this quote gave me furiously to think at the weekend, and has stayed with me all week. Sometimes a piece of writing will for no reason nudge me over on to a different track, sometimes one I’d left years ago, and I pick up the pursuit of that thought from the point I left it. If that makes any sense.