“I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale.”
"The State of the Theatre" an interview by Henry Brandon in Harpers 221 (November 1960)
Context: I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge.
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Arthur Miller 147
playwright from the United States 1915–2005Related quotes

“I know too well what I am going to say. I know it too well before writing.”

Take up home gardening!"
Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

" My Father's Suitcase", Nobel Prize for Literature lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html (December 7, 2006).

On her obsession with writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)
“I am such a slow learner that once I understand something I might as well write it down!”
When asked about his prolific publication record; quoted in Computer Pioneers by John A. N. Lee, pg. 510.

In a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, New York 1925; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists, ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 224
1920s

Quote from his letter to Jawlensky, early Februari 1935; as cited in 'The shape of the Future 3: Art' in Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin 2012, p. unknown
Cage bought one of the small 'Head' paintings of Jawlensky, via his art-agent Galka E. Scheyer who showed Cage some paintings of Jawlensky early 1935, and sold his choice very cheap for 25 dollars; Cage was then 25 years old and strongly inspired by images, as he told Scheyer and wrote Jawlensky
1930s

Quote, 1914, from: Foreword
1970s, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)