“A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll have to get used to existing quite naturally within this solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, fastened to the ‘presence of absence.'”

Roland Barthes

more info

“Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down, and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, that the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives that that’s how things work.
        If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings. And I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.”

Brian Eno

more info

“I always end up in the same place after I finish recording and touring an album: devoid of ideas, and afraid I won’t be able to write anything worthwhile again. One of the first thoughts to flicker into that void tends to be, How can I make my next work relate to what preceded it? I usually make a plan, which later reveals itself to be moot, but to which I cling for a little while, in a talismanic sense.”

Joanna Newsom

more info

“How much can one remove, and still have the composition be intelligible? Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway.”

David Mamet

more info

“My first stepfather used to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book. Well, here it is.”

Tobias Wolff

more info

“I always say that I am able to use the interstices. There is a lot of space between atom and atom and electron and electron, and if we reduced the matter of the universe by eliminating all the space in between, the entire universe would be compressed into a ball. Our lives are full of interstices. This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.”

Umberto Eco

more info

“We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot co-ordinate what is not there.”

Cyril Connolly

more info

“For some reason, the idea of absence, of leaving things out, has been very important in my work.”

John Baldessari

more info