(5 August 2007)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007
Context: It has been my experience that many people actually believe that writers live in a state of perpetual inspiration. Maybe this is the source of that annoying "Where do you get your ideas from?" question. Maybe the people who believe writers live in a state of perpetual inspiration are the same people who ask that question, thinking — wrongly — that there's a trick of some sort involved. And if a writer would but tell them the trick, then they too would have access to the bottomless well of ideas and live in a state of perpetual inspiration. In my case, at least, there is no bottomless fucking well of ideas, and if I only wrote when I truly felt inspired, I'd starve and live in a cardboard box at the corner of Crack and Whore (which is to say, the corner of Ponce and Piedmont). But, that said, there does have to be a spark. What people ought to be asking me is "Where do you get those tiny, little infinitesimally faint sparks that you then somehow manage to blow up into ideas?" Of course, my answer would be, "I have no inkling whatsoever."
“Symons … remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited—long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms—what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.”
Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 113.
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Alain de Botton 146
Swiss writer 1969Related quotes
Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 44.
Max Wertheimer (1923). "Laws of organization in perceptual forms." Translation published in W. D. Ellis (Ed.), A source book of Gestalt psychology, pp. 71–94. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1938. (Original title: Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt II); Online http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Wertheimer/Forms/forms.htm at psychclassics.yorku.ca, accessed 03.2017.
Jennifer Romanello, Chapter 30, p. 323
2000s, The Guardian (2003)
“Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before.”
Charlie Rose interview (2001)