Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
How many of those forty-something celebrities, staring out from the covers of magazines with their beautiful babies, have conceived naturally, or without assistance? Not as many as you might think I would wager - yet for so many women they act as fertility beacons, a symbol of hope in a landscape of diminishing fertility.
Deprived of the opportunity to judge one another by the cars we drive, New Yorkers, thrown together daily on mass transit, form silent opinions based on our choices of subway reading. Just by glimpsing the cover staring back at us, we can reach the pinnacle of carnal desire or the depths of hatred. Soul mate or mortal enemy.
Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries.
It was the '50s, and the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System were in fashion. I hung out in the 812 section - American theater and plays. This is where I first read Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' and was transfixed. I remember staring into space for what seemed an eternity after reading Linda Loman's final speech.
I'm not drawn to people that much unless there's a really serious energy happening, but I'll take a lot of pictures of trees, or I'm always staring at the ground. I'll see an oil stain that looks like something out of 'Lord of the Rings' or something, and that's what kind of calls to me... I'm drawn to that aspect of photography.
When I wrote the opera, I made a deal with myself that for at least an hour a day I would work on it, even if it meant just sitting on my piano bench, staring into space and thinking about it. It's about keeping it regular, like your bowel movements - let's get real: it's your bodily artistic movements! It comes from the same place.
Being in school, whenever I laughed or smiled, I would turn to find someone staring at me with this terrible hatred and disgust. I had to control everything - control my voice, control my facial expressions, control my hair and my clothes, and where I walked and where I sat - at every moment. I think that drove me to terrible anxiety.
In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.
Some days, who can stare at swathes of sky, leafage and bad-complected whale-gray streets, tailpipes and smokestacks orating sepia exhaust, or the smaller enthusiasms of pistil and mailbox key, and not weep for the world's darks on lights, lights on darks, how its half-tones stay unchanged in their changings, or how turning wheels and wind-trash and revolving doors weave us into wakefulness or dump us into distraction?
