Apr 3, 2011

remember, remember

One forgets why one drinks. What have I written these days? I've written nothing. The paper white, the pencils sharpened, untouched. Remember! Remember, dear traveler, why you drink. It is not to be found on the path that lies ahead - it is on the one that lies between sky and earth. Remember.

"You will write," [Gertrude Stein] said, "if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. Yes, before in a thought, but not in careful thinking. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition. You won't know how it was, even what it is, but it will be creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you are doing. Technique is not so much a thing of form or style as the way that form or style came and how it can come again."

- John Hyde Preston

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