
“My strip is not like the kind that depends on variety or new characters. I’ve got pretty much the same characters and basic idea that I had so many years ago. I want to keep the strip simple. I like it, for example, when Charlie Brown watches the first leaf of fall float down and then walks over and just says, ‘Did you have a good summer?’ That’s the kind of strip that gives me pleasure to do.”
Charles Schulz
more infosource: quoted in Barnaby Conrad’s Introduction, in Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2002), 22.
category: cartoon, Charlie Brown, creative process, fall, simplicity, Snoopy, summer
medium: Nonfiction
“One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much. Physical shedding to begin with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields. Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full. And what a relief it is! Less taking up and down of hems, less mending, and—best of all—less worry about what to wear. One finds one is shedding not only clothes—but vanity.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
more infosource: Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 24–25.
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category: beach, clothes, materialism, ocean, paring down, sea, shed, simplicity, stuff
medium: nonfiction
“The abstract beauty of Japanese art issues from the abstract beauty of their lives. They do not like clutter. They like to look at one flower at a time, one painting, one pot. They have a storage house for the objects of art which are not being displayed.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 22.
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category: beauty, clutter, Japan, simplicity
medium: diary
notes: from a summer 1966 entry in Nin's diary (observations of her trip to Japan)


simplicity