"What advice have I for the potential writer?
I have none, for anybody is a potential writer,
and the writer who is a writer needs needs no
advice and seeks none....The writer is a
spiritual anarchist as in the depth of his soul
every man is. He is discontented with everything
and everybody....When he's dead he'll probably
be as dead as others are dead, but while he is
alive he is alive as no one else is, not even
another writer....He is also mad, measureably so,
but saner than all others, with the best sanity, the
only sanity worth bothering about - the living,
creative, vulnerable, valorous, unintimitated, and
arrogant sanity of a free man."
- William Saroyan
Quoted in ESSENTIAL SAROYAN
Reviewed In LA Times Book Review
September 11, 2005
The Book, unlike today's newspaper review, probably includes study of Saroyan's play(s?). For a writer of fiction this quote is liberating, inspiring, stirring, wonderfully reckless, somewhat along the lines of the power in William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he has the guts to urge writers to write about love and passion. And, best of all, Saroyan (an American Armenian) truly says that anyone can be a writer. I believe that, know that, celebrate that truth. Barry (Now, please, please, read the quote again, and slowly, like making long love.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I have read your journal to this entry and can appreciate your prolific interest in literature. I am reading the Smithsonian, Wilson Quarterly, some PC magazines, and have been getting the daily newspaper which I read nearly every article. I am slow at reading and must lay on a board to support my back when I can no longer sit in a chair. I am re reading "An Historical Introduction to the New Testament" by Bart Erhman. I can just imagine what it must to have been like to be in a "Christian" church in the second century. It is with that beginning belief by people that I most associate my belief with. It seems like all of the baggage that goes with modern religion, just get me confused. I also enjoy watching PBS and was amazed at a recent showing about the "big bang theory". The idea that the Universe was once the size of a large pearl. Hydrogen and Carbon I believe were said to be the only two elements to exist, and stars "exploding" created more and more elements. mark
http://journals.aol.com/mtrib2/landscapeartwork
http://journals.aol.com/mtrib2/MarksDailyJournal
Post a Comment