On writing | quotes & excerpts

A note sounds. Then it sounds again. But everything has changed.
Paul Griffiths

Một khi anh có sáng tác viết lách được ra cái gì đó - với anh rất có thể nó là ngẫu phát - ra với cộng đồng nó sẽ vang vọng xô dạt như là những ngẫu phát khác, sai biệt vô chừng.
Tung H

Ngoài ra, viết văn đâu có gì khác hơn là mơ một giấc mơ có lối đi.
Jorge Luis Borges

Precision is the soul of the artist's work.
Gustav Mahler

A painter's moments of illumination must not come to him through his consciousness (any more than do those of any other artist). His discoveries, mysterious even to him, must bypass the long road of deliberation and go so fast into his work that he has no time to notice the transition. If he lies in wait for them, observes them, holds them back, they will turn to dust like the gold in the fairy-tale.
Rainer Maria Rilke (about Cézanne)

to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Jorge Luis Borges

Life knows us not and we do not know life - we don't even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.
Joseph Conrad