Беседы с мертвыми и живыми
Наткнулся на архив the Paris Review, у которого есть просто обалденная серия интереснейших интервью с писателями, режиссерами и прочими творческими личностями (фамилии кликабельны): Борхес, Бродский, Брэдбери, Вудхаус, Воннегут, Том Вулф, Гарднер, Грэм Грин, Кинг, Кортасар, Ле Карре, Льоса, Маркес, Неруда, Фолкнер, Хэмингуэй, Ирвин Шоу (раз и два), Эко и множество других.
Стоит ли говорить, что некоторым из них уже больше пяти десятков лет? Несмотря на внушительный объем (прочтение некоторых бесед может занять не один час), чтение весьма увлекательное.
В этом посте буду потихоньку собирать понравившиеся и интересные высказывания.
-- Цитатник --
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life (c) Бродский
But the main thing is that the place [Venice] is so beautiful that you can live there without being in love. It’s so beautiful that you know that nothing in your life you can come up with or produce-especially in terms of pure existence-would have a corresponding beauty (c) Бродский
When you live long you see that little things end up in big damages (c) Бродский
You go to bed every night thinking that you’ve written the most brilliant passage ever done, which somehow the next day you realize is sheer drivel (c) Том Вулф
You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through (c) Хэмингуэй
But the best writing is certainly when you are in love (c) Хэмингуэй
I’m always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply (c) Хэмингуэй
Surely. If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen. If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, et cetera. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.
Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this time and could convey the experience completely and have it be one that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that I had a good man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still are such things. Then the ocean is worth writing about just as man is. So I was lucky there. I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg (c) Хэмингуэй