Tag: quotes

Categories
Books Quotes

Haruki Murakami: ‘I run in order to acquire a void’

“But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void… As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I’m not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir
Categories
Books Productivity & Work

Henry Miller on why we create

“I reached out for something to attach myself to—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself. I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live.”

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
Categories
Books Quotes

‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives’

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Categories
Productivity & Work Quotes

Alain de Botton: When the work begins

via Twitter

“Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”

Alain de Botton
Categories
Arts Quotes

Pablo Picasso on the importance of solitude in doing serious work

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

Pablo Picasso
Categories
Books Creativity Quotes Writing

Ta-Nehisi Coates: made for the library, not the classroom

“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates