Category: Quotes

One 'settles down' into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to gay self-forgetfulness. A man 'falls' into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easiler to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

Samuel Beckett, cited

The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write.

Bolano, interviewed

THE SPACE OF WRITING. Not so much unreal as dark. I am in my light. I cast my shadow over what I would see. I am my own obstacle. How move in such a space? And where? Night without clear outlines, without profiles, let alone their reproduction. No words. None at all. Or few, thin like hair. Slow, out-of-breath climbing the stairs. Leaden legs. Start, break off, out of it, always. Then, in the good moments: a sudden streaming. Grass bending in the wind.

from Rosemarie Waldorp's 'The Ground is the Only Figure'

Leibniz's dictum about the melancholy of the eternal structure is my basic tenet. I know I'll die in melancholy, I know that one day, in profound melancholy, even the starry sky will fall in, yet there are also moments when I suddenly feel that eternity does endure and that I am; that sometimes I even am who am. What Moses was told by God.

Bohmuil Hrabal, in conversation

… except for odd moments I've no reason for thinking I'm happy, or that I … Failure - you see I love ruination, I love hangovers. If I've ever had a noble thought, then it's always been at a moment like that, with a hangover, or shortly afterwards. Meaning a condition of being at rock-bottom and gazing upwards …

Bohumil Hrabal, in conversation

I will walk with my song torn open.

Cassandra in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, translated by Anne Carson (via)

Sometimes it seems to me that the curtain is about to lift which separates me from my work, from the way my work now must be. I have a sense of something imminent coming closer. But then I lose it again, become ordinary and inadequate. I feel like someone who is trying to guess an object being described by music. The sound grows steadily louder; he thinks he is on the point of grasping it, and then the sound becomes weaker again and he has to look for another answer.

from the diary of Kaethe Kollwitz

Right now, I just want to get away for awhile. I think I need a lot of things. One of them is time…time to study and finish some things I started a long time ago…I never seem to have time to work, study, and write. Everything becomes secondary to going to work every night and wondering how the band sounds and whether our appearances are okay. (via)

Sonny Rollins, 1958, before he stopped playing in public and started woodshedding on Brooklyn Bridge. A perfect way to announce a break from blogging, except blogging is woodshedding, and there'll be plenty more this year of the usual thing from me, right here at the blog.

– What are these?

– My life's work. My memoirs. My confession.

– What have you done?

– I've been bad. Repeatedly. But why brag? The details of my exploits are only a pretext for a … far more expansive consideration of general truths.

– What is this?

– It's a philosophy. A poetics. A politics, if you will. A literature of protest. A novel of ideas. A pornographic magazine of truly comic-book proportions. It is in the end whatever the hell I want it to be. And when I'm through with it, it's going to blow a hole this wide … straight through the world's idea of itself.

dialogue from Henry Fool

Have I spoken or announced anything worthy of God? Rather I feel that I have done nothing but wish to speak: if I have spoken, I have not said what I wished to say.

Augustine (via)

A few days later, he stood in my room and said I am Walser. A tall rather lanky fellow with ruddy, bony features, under a thick blond thatch that fought off the comb, dreamy blue-grey eyes and beautifully formed large hands protruding from the sleeves of a jacket too small for him; they seemed not to know what to do with themselves, and wished they could have crept into the trouser-pockets so as not to be there. This was Walser, half journeyman apprentice, half page-boy, all poet. He had brought along what I’d asked to see. And he pulled out a lined school jotter bound in black linen: there were the poems. They were all he had. They were thirty-odd in number. They filled the thin notebook with their beautiful, crisp handwriting, which ran smoothly and evenly, without anything unruly or fancy. It was rare for a single word to be crossed out and replaced in what was nonetheless a first draft . . . This young person gave every impression of having heard there was such a thing as poetry from hearsay or report, that he had invented the music and the instrument on which it was played at the same time, so wholly unformed by reading or literary taste were these poems.

essayist Franz Blei’s recollection of his first meeting with Walser, from Michael Hoffman's 'Perfect and Serene Oddity', London Review of Books

The first thing that struck me about Benjamin – indeed it was characteristic of him all of his life – was that he never could remain seated quietly during a conversation but immediately began to pace up and down in the room as he formulated his sentences. At some point, he would stop before me and in the most intense voice deliver his opinion on the matter. Or he might offer several viewpoints in turn, as if he were conducting an experiment. If the two of us were alone, he would look me full in the face as he spoke. At other times, when he fixed his eyes on the most remote corner of the ceiling (which he often did, particularly when addressing a larger audience), he assumed a virtually magical appearance. This rigid stare contrasted sharply with his usual lively gestures.

When I reflect on what it was he had in common after these first encounters, I can cite a few things that are not to be overlooked easily. I can describe them only in general terms as a resoluteness in pursuing our intellectual goals, rejection of our environment – which was basically German-Jewish assimilated middle class – and a positive attitude toward metaphyiscs. We were proponents of radical demands. Actually, at the universities the two of us did not have any teachers in the real sense of the word, so we educated ourselves, each in a very different way.

Associating with Benjamin was fraught with considerable difficulties, though on the surface these seemed insignificant in view of his consummate courtesy and willingness to listen. He was always surrounded by a wall of reserve, which could be recognised intuitively and was evident to another person even without Benjamin's not infrequent efforts to make that area noticeable.

from Scholem's The Story of a Friendship

Personally, he was a most amiable presence, tall, with the bearing and the ruddy complexion of an alpine mountaineer, a handsome, boyish face with a sailor's long, greenish, narrowed eyes trained on the far distance. He lived in Ohlfield, a village near Gmunden-on-the-Traunsee in alpine Austria, in a stately farmhouse with a huge square inner courtyard which had taken six years out of his writing life, he said, to restore singlehanded from the decayed ruin filled with mountains of refuse parked there by the neighbours who, resenting the loss of their garbage dump, had sabotaged his efforts with persistent ingenuity. Inside, he had painted the floors a black lacquer, the walls all white, had installed green-tiled stoves and wall-length bookshelves, a bare table, a few wooden chairs, a bed in the centre of the upstairs bedroom that held virtually no other furniture. The tall windows let in much green-tinged light from the surrounding trees. The effect was serene, monastic …

Sophie Wilkins on Thomas Bernhard, from the Introduction of her translation of On The Mountain

Kafka was the most important and fundamental experience of my youth, a bitter-sweet upheaval which brought into play all the potentialities of my self, a trauma of adolescence which, at the time when I made Kafka's acquaintance, I tried to master by making careful entries in my diary.

[…] My 'Treasury of Ideas' was, I now see, an amorphous collection of hastily recorded scraps of reading and conversation, the origin of which I only really knew at the moment when I wrote them down.

[…] I made a selection of entries in my diary, and from my 'Treasury of Ideas' for Florian to publish in Czech. But this never happened …

[…] Then there began for me a period of restless wandering between different people, towns, ideas and ocupations. In the course of it, the intellectual and emotional experience of my youth was drowned by a flood of new adventures. The image of Kafka faded away. I turned away from what had been fundamental to my youth[….] the grey book of my 'Treasury of Ideas' lay abandoned under a pile of old notebooks, sketches, drawings and newspaper cuttings[….] My mind was purified only by the pressure of war and violence. I suddenly stood face to face with the insect world of The Metamorphosis and the cold and merciless machinery of In the Penal Settlement …

From Janouch's Conversations With Kafka

[Who trusts Janouch's introduction to the second edition of his conversations with Kafka? Trustworthy or not, it's moving. In fact, I like the lies, which are so obviously lies …]

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation[….]

Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue[….]

We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile[….]

Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled into some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

From 'Lessons of Darkness', Herzog on Herzog

For some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you had traveled alone on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about 5,000 kilometers. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.

from Herzog on Herzog

… even as children we existed in constant fear of apoplexy, in abject dread of earthquakes, fear of collapsing buildings, rabies, in constant dread of being beaten to death, of being run over …

Thomas Bernhard, Amras

Maybe the most important piece of advice I can give to those of you heading into the world of film is that as long as you are able-bodied, as long as you can make money yourself, do not go looking for office jobs to pay the rent[….] Go out to where the real world is, go work as a bouncer in a sex-club, a warden in a lunatic asylum or in a slaughterhouse. Walk on foot, learn languages, learn a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking must have experience of life as its foundation. I know that so much of what is in my films is not just invention, it is very much life itself, my own life.

from Herzog on Herzog

… there is a psychology professor [at Cornell] who discovered that in order to know how good you are at something, it requires almost exactly the same skills and aptitude as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. In other words, if you're a really good tennis player or mathematician then you know how to tell how good you are. But it also means if you're absolutely no good at something then you lack exactly the skills to realise your idiocy. It explains why so many idiots out there have no idea that they're idiots.

John Cleese, interviewed. Via Twitchelmore.

When, consciously, thirteen years old, I consciously claimed the desire to write – I wrote as a child, but I had not claimed a destiny -, when I claimed the desire to write, I suddenly found myself in a void. And in that void there was nobody who could help me. I had to lift up myself from a nothingness, I myself had to understand myself, I myself had to invent, in a manner of speaking, my own truth. I started, and it wasn't even from the beginning. The papers piled up – the meanings contradicted one another, the despair of not being able was one more obstacle for really not being able to. The never-ending story which I then began to write […], what a pity that I didn't keep it: I tore it up, despising an entire attempt at apprenticeship, at self-knowledge. And doing everything in such secrecy. I didn't tell anyone; I lived that pain alone. One thing I had already guessed: I would hgave to try to write always, not waiting for a better moment because that would simply never come. Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go.

Clarice Lispector, cited in Benjamin Moser's biography

For too long now we have been estranged from the essential, which is the nomadic life: travelling on foot[….]

My voyages on foot have always been essential experiences for me. For many hours during my walk around Germany, sometimes even a day or two at a time, there was no well or creek to drink from. I would knock on the door of a farmhouse and ask for something to drink. 'Where are you from?', the farmer would ask. I would say Sachrang. 'How far aways is this?' 'About 1500 kilometers', I would reply. 'How did you get here' And the moment I would explain that I walked, there is no more small talk. [….]

When you travel on foot, you come with a different intensity. Travelling on foot has nothing to do with exercise[….]

When I am walking I fall deep into dreams, I float through fantasies and find myself inside unbelievable stories. I literally walk through whole novels and films and football matches. I do not even look at where I am stepping, but I never lose my direction. When I come out of a big story I find myself 25 or 30 kilometers further on. How I got there I don't know[….]

In 1974 we German filmmakers were still fragile, and when a friend told me Lotte [Eisner, film critic] had suffered a massive stroke and I should get on the next plane to Paris, I made the decision not to fly. It was not the right thing to do, and because I just could not accept that she might die, I walked from Munich to her apartment in Paris. I put on a shirt, grabbed a bundle of clothes, a map and a compass, and set off in a straight line, sleeping under bridges, in farms and abandoned houses. I made only one detour to the town of Troyes because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.

I walked against her death, knowing that if I walked on foot she would be alive where I got there. And that is just what happened. Lotte lived until the age of ninety or thereabouts, and years after the walk, when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films, she said to me, 'Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now'. Jokingly I said, 'OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away'. Three weeks later she died.

When you travel on foot with this intensity, it is not a matter of covering actual ground, rather it is a question of moving through your own inner landscapes.

from Herzog on Herzog

We are all ill, with one malaise or another, a deep-rooted malaise that is inseparable from what we are and that somehow makes us what we are, you might even say that each one of us is his own illness, we are so little because of it, and yet we succeed in being so much because of it.

from Jose Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

I have never set out to imbue my films with literary or philosophical references. Film should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars, but illiterates.

from Herzog on Herzog

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

from Herzog on Herzog

WH: Whether Philippe's walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn't matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realized that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.

PP: But the cows remember.

Philippe Petit and Werner Herzog in conversation

… the crew couldn't take [the scene with the dancing chicken], they hated it, they were a loyal group and in case of Stroszek they hated it so badly that I had to operate the camera myself because the cinematographer who was very good and dedicated, hated it so much that he didn't want to shoot it. He said, "I've never seen anything as dumb as that.” And I tried to say, "You know there's something so big about it." But they couldn't see it.

[….] the dancing chicken was shot in Cherokee, North Carolina. When you are speaking about these images, there's something bigger about them, and I keep saying that we do have to develop an adequate language for our state of civilization, and we do have to create adequate pictures – images for our civilization. If we do not do that, we die out like dinosaurs, so it's of a different magnitude, trying to do something against the wasteland of images that surround us, on television, magazines, post cards, posters in travel agencies…

Herzog, interviewed

– And it is mysterious how cinema works in that respect. It is the placement of a shot that makes it so important, and makes it highly significant. It’s like the end of “Stroszek”, for example, with the dancing chicken. But then, the technical crew or almost everyone on location hated the film so much that ultimately the cinematographer refused to shoot it (the shot) and said: “We are going for lunch now if you want to film that shit. “ And I said: “I’m gonna film that shit, sure.” And I tried to tell them. “Don’t you see there’s something very very big here?” And nobody saw it. It was really big. And it’s still one of the best things I ever filmed in my life.

– That’s one of the most beautiful endings of a film…

– Even the crew that I paid and who were loyal to me went on strike.

[…]

– And one thing about that scene, it is a rare occurrence of inter-cutting different things happening simultaneously, from Bruno on the mountain to the animals (chickens, ducks, rabbits) dancing and playing music and to the truck on fire making circles outside. Usually your scenes are rather large segments, set in one space, one situation, often shot in long takes….

– Yes but the animals dance for quite a while so you hang on to that. The problem was that the chickens wouldn’t dance for more than 15 seconds and then they would retreat. We had them in special training for dancing as long as they could. When you fed a quarter into the machine, the music would play and the chicken would dance. And as a reward it would get some corn. They were accustomed to dancing for 3 to 5 seconds. Now I held them in training for a couple of months to dance as long as they could. But they would only dance for 15 seconds. The problem is, I couldn’t get away with an ending that was a 15 second shot. I had quite a few of those shots and I had to add them together. There was always a jump cut. So there were technical reasons behind it as well. Very often it’s not an ideology or so that’s behind something.

Herzog, interviewed

In myths people live forever. In fairy-tales they live happily ever after. In novels there is, at the end of the 'ever after', the beginning of unhappiness, and usually even before.

from Cees Nooteboom's In the Dutch Mountains