“The paper is breathless
Under the hand
And the pencil is poised
Like a warlock's wand.”
Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator
Poem in The Glassblowers (1950)
As quoted in The Super 8 Book (1975) by Lenny Lipton (ed. Chet Roaman); also in Aesthetic Aspects of Recent Experimental Film (1980) by Barry Walter Moore, Garth S. Jowett, p. 6
“The paper is breathless
Under the hand
And the pencil is poised
Like a warlock's wand.”
Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator
Poem in The Glassblowers (1950)
Alan Turing Intelligent Machinery
"Intelligent Machinery: A Report by A. M. Turing," (Summer 1948), submitted to the National Physical Laboratory (1948) and published in Key Papers: Cybernetics, ed. C. R. Evans and A. D. J. Robertson (1968) and, in variant form, in Machine Intelligence 5, ed. B. Meltzer and D. Michie (1969).
Wong Kar-wai (1958) Hong Kong screenwriter, film producer and film director
"The Demonstrative Wong Kar Wai" in Interview Magazine (22 August 2013) https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/wong-kar-wai-the-grandmaster
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist
1:73
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)
“When my pencil starts moving, it must be allowed its head or - bang! - nothing more happens.”
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter
Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 61/62 - in a letter to his friend Etienne Devismes, Late Summer of 1881
Tom Robbins (1932) American writer
The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)
Context: Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work. The pervasive brutality in current fiction – the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord – is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world. Less apparent is that bland writing — timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing – is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)
Donald Kuspit (1935) American art critic
"Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art" http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/gallery/kuspit_d/reconsidering_print.htm, Blackbird (2003).