“I think van Gogh was one of the great, great draftsmen. I love the little sketches in his letters, which seem like drawings of drawings. They are condensed versions of the big pictures he was painting at the time, so that Theo and the other people he was writing to could understand what he was doing. These days he’d be sending them on his iPhone. When you look at them, they contain everything. It’s all there. He certainly didn’t do anything by halves.”
David Hockney
more infosource: A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 187.
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category: art, drawing, iPhone, letter, painting, technology
medium: Interview
“Today I got a letter from a man who said he had spent his childhood among characters such as I had portrayed. Poor man. He said since he had seen them in print they burdened his conscience less.”
Flannery O'Connor
more infosource: letter to Catharine Carver dated August 10, 1955, in Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 95. (Catherine Carver was O’Connor’s longtime editor at Harcourt Brace.)
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category: book, childhood, letter, writing
medium: Letter
“Letters by a living man are a bit like a stately home with the owner around—one isn’t sure how much one can touch.”
Wilfrid Sheed
more infosource: “Letters of E. B. White,” in The Good Word and Other Words (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 252.
category: letter
medium: Book review
notes: beautiful essay about Sheed's writing published by Dwight Garner here
“Is anything more pleasurable to the mind than unsullied paper? The studious comparisons and selection of ‘stock’ in textures and colors of cards and paper?”
Frank Lloyd Wright
more infosource: Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2005), 36.
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category: card, letter, paper, texture
medium: Autobiography
“The arrival of letters was the first grand object of every morning’s impatience.”
Jane Austen
more infosource: Pride and Prejudice: A Novel in Three Volumes, Vol. 3 (London: Printed for T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall, 1813), 115.
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category: anticipation, letter, morning
medium:
“A good book of letters beats an almost-good novel any day.”
Dwight Garner
more infosource: “Friends Who Didn’t Mince Words,” The New York Times, December 9, 2010.
category: book review, letter, novel
medium: book review
“Send me a little note, old pal. Remember you occupy one of the top compartments of my heart.”
Saul Bellow
more infosource: letter to Samuel Freifeld, dated November 5, 1955, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 142.
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category: friendship, heart, letter, love
medium: letter
As ever (whatever that is),
Saul Bellow
more infosource: the closing of the letter to John Hunt, dated September 13, 1995, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 509.
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category: communication, letter, sign offs
medium: letter
“The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared.”
Vivian Gornick
more infosource: “Letters are Acts of Faith; Telephone Calls Are a Reflex,” The New York Times, July 31, 1994.
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category: communication, letter, loneliness, solitude, technology, telephone
medium: newspaper article
letter