Category: Quotes

Pauline Kael in The New Yorker on one of my favourite Godard films, Sauve qui pert (la vie), called Slow Motion in the UK and Every Man for Himself in the USA:

More than the fat has been burned out of Every Man For Himself: the juice has gone, too … If it were possible to have lyricism without emotion, that might describe the film’s style … I got the feeling that Godard doesn’t believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn’t really believe in movies anymore, either.

What would it mean to write without believing in writing? Doesn’t Godard say elsewhere he intends to make cinema rather than films (writing rather than books)?

… after making For Ever Mozart, he contacted Otchakovsky-Laurent again to say that he now wanted to create a book of ‘sentences’ from that film and to do so the same for other works of his. The publisher prepared a manuscript of For Ever Mozart, and Godard removed all descriptions and stage directions, ‘everything except what is said in the film’. Then he rearranged the spoken text in a process which Otchakovsky-Laurent described as ‘an authentic work of versification’. The result did not resemble a published script; the sentences, broken into short, unpunctuated lines, without attribution to the characters, indeed resemble poetry. Godard expressed his satisfaction with the result, declaring, ‘These are sounds and phrases which correspond to a type of diction, my own’. The genre under which the book is listed is also Godard’s pown – ‘phrases’, that is, sentences, – although many of the book’s phgrases, or sentences, were not his own: the book features a list of sixteen cited authors, including Georges Bernanos, Marguerite Duras, James Agee and André Bazin.

(from Richard Brody’s admirable Everything is Cinema.)

Now isn’t that beautiful: the idea of a voice that occupies every particular voice in a work of art? Of a narrative voice that even gathers up what is quoted. Phrases – to be capable of a book of sentences written by no one and by everyone.

From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:

– I never read philosophy.
– Why not?
– I don’t understand it.
[…]
– Why did you write your books?
– I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

I could add a hundred more, two hundred more shades to my personality … each one independent of the others, following a path of its own.

Of what literary expression would I be capable? How could I fend for myself in these conditions?

A Frenchman or an Englishment never experiences such lack of harmony – at least not to this extent. Whatever a Frenchman or an Englishman might feel individually, even if he is profoundly torn within himself, he will aways seek refuge in a certain national, English or French form, which has been elaborated over the centuries.

I was Polish.

Gombrowicz's Polishness, his disharmony means any beginning is an arbitrary one, and the attempt to finish a book in the same style (the same shade) is only an arbitrary effort of will.

I always wanted to tell the story of my life. The entire beginning of my analysis was me telling a story. A linear, continuous story. I never lost the thread; I ‘strung things together’, always knowing ahead of time what I was going to say: never the slightest break, the slightest gap, never the slightest flaw where a slip of the tongue might have a chance to sneak in, where something might happen. And thus nothing happened. From the other side of the couch, nothing. ‘My life’ was met with indifference.

Everything ‘started’ when I had nothing more to say, when I no longer knew where to start or how to end. At that moment, what I had recounted before came back, but in a way that was entirely other, in a discontinuous way, in different forms (memories, dreams, slips, repetitions), or it never came back. I understood that I had tried, by telling the story of ‘my life’, not to recount it – it is too much for words – but to master it. I had been at once foolish and unfaithful.

My mouth then stopped being the place from which flowed a reassuring discourse and became a cave from which more or less articulate and intelligible words burst forth, cries whose extremely variable tone (booming, evanescent, barely audible, halting, melodious, etc.) surprised even me. I had never heard myself speak like this, and ‘I’ did not recognise ‘myself’. […]

from Sarah Kofman, ‘"My Life" and Psychoanalysis’, Selected Writings

I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau’s letters, for instance, they’re beautifully written. He dashed off twenty-three in a day if necessary, and they’re all balanced, they’re all beautiful prose. Flaubert’s letters are already quite haphazard; they’re no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they’re very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it’s getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

Conversations with W.G. Sebald

There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I’m hardly interested in the future. I don’t think it will hold many good things. But at least about the past you can have certain illusions.

Conversations with W.G. Sebald

The artist doesn’t think, if by ‘thinking’ we mean the elaboration of a chain of concepts. In him thought is born from contact with the matter which it forms, like something auxilary, like the demands of matter itself, like the requirement of a form in the process of being born. Truth is less important to the artist than that his work should succeed, that it should come to life. My ‘thoughts’ were formed together with my work, they gnawed their way perversely and tenaciously into a world which gradually revealed itself.

Witold Gombrowicz

Ozu’s most endearing characteristic, for me, is what Sato calls his "pillow shots." The term comes from the "pillow words" used in Japanese poetry – words that may not advance or even refer to the subject, but are used for their own sake and beauty, as a sort of punctuation. In Ozu, a sequence will end and then, before the next begins, there will be a shot of a tree, or a cloud, or a smokestack, or a passing train, or a teapot, or a street corner. It is simply a way of looking away, and regaining composure before looking back again. (via)

Ozu’s use of "pillow shots," which unobtrusively break up the action and give the viewer a moment to contemplate or rest. The "pillow shots" consist of flowers or banners or whatnot … (via)

Much has been made of Ozu’s visual devices: the camera pitched to the eye level of an ideal spectator watching from the comfort of a tatami mat; the compositions that emphasize the geometric qualities of the Japanese interior, with its clean lines, right angles and frames within frames; the "pillow shots," as Ozu called them, of wind-rustled trees, passing trains, empty side streets, that provide buffers of silence and reflection between dramatic scenes. (via)

Ozu also developed a curious form of transition, which various critics have labeled "pillow shots" or "curtain shots." Between scenes, he would always place carefully framed shots of the surroundings to signal changes in setting, as well as for less obvious reasons. Basically a hybrid of the cutaway and placing shots, these transitions were considered unusual for extended length; they sometimes seem motivated more by graphic composition and pacing than by the demands of the narrative. (via)

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realised it was much later than I thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn’t very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: ‘You asking me the way?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘since I can’t find it myself’. ‘Give it up! Give it up!’, said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

Kafka

I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. In the distance, I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me and asked: ‘Where is the master going?’ ‘I don’t know’, I said, ‘just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal.’ ‘So you know your goal?’ he asked. ‘Yes’, I replied, ‘I’ve just told you. Out of here – that’s my goal’.

Kafka

Jacques Derrida, asked to narrate something of his life in an interview:

I wish that a narration were possible. For the moment it is not possible. I dream of managing one day not to recount this legacy, this past experience, this history, but at least to give a narration of it among other possible narrations. But in order to get there, I would have to undertake a kind of work, I would have to set out on an adventure that up till now I have not been capable of. To invent, to invent a language, to invent modes of anamnesis … For me, it is this adventure that interests me the most in a certain way, but which still today seems practically inaccessible.

So having said that, am I going to take the risk here, while improvising, of telling you things that would resemble a narration? No! … I don’t feel capable of giving myself over to … variations on my memory, my inheritance. All the more so in that this inheritance – if it is one – is multiple, not very homogeneous, full of all kinds of grafts.

… I see the journey of my brief existence as a journey in view of determining and naming the place from which I will have had the experience of exteriority. And the anamnesis we were talking about at the outset, this anamnesis would be in view of identifying, of naming it – not effacing the exteriority, I don’t think it can be effacted – but of naming it, identifying it, and thinking it a little better.

… a récit is not simply a memory reconstituting a past; a récit is also a promise, it is also something that makes a commitment toward the future. What I dream of is not only the narration of a past that is inaccessible to me, but a narration that would also be a future, that would determine a future.

Films are created when there’s no one looking.

Wim Wenders

Can we find an analogue of matter in the order of thought itself? Is there a matter of thought, a nuance, a grain which makes an event for thought and unsettles it, analogously with what I have described in the sensory order? Perhaps here we have to invoke words. Perhaps words themselves, in the most secret place of thought, are its matter, its timbre, its nuance, i.e. what it cannot manage to think.

Words ‘say’ sound, touch, always ‘before’ touch, always ‘before’ thought. And they always ‘say’ something other than what thought signifies, and what it wants to signify by putting them into form.

Words want nothing. They ae the ‘un-will’, the ‘non-sense’ of thought, its mass. They are innumerable[….] They are always older than thought. They can be semiologised, philologised, just as nuances are chromatised and timbres gradualised. But like timbres and nuances, they are always being born.

Lyotard, from The Inhuman

Idiomatic: property that one cannot appropriate; it signs you without belonging to you; it only appears to the other and it never comes back to you except in flashes of madness that bring together life and death, that bring you together dead and alive at the same time. You dream, it’s unavoidable, about the invention of a language or a song that would be yours, not the attributes of a ‘self’, rather the accentuated paraph, that is, the musical signature, of your most unreadable history. I’m not talking about a style but an intersection of singularities, habitat, voices, graphims, that moves with you and your body never leaves.

In my memory, what I write resembles a dotted line drawing that would be circling around a book to be written in which I call for myself the ‘old new language’, the most archaic and the most novel, therefore unheard-of, unreadable at present. This book would be something completely other from the path that it nevertheless still resembles. In any case, an interminable anamnesis whose form is being sought: not only my history, but culture, languages, families … the accumulation of dreams, projects, or notes no doubt weighs on what is written in the present.

One day, some piece of the book may fall out like a stone that keeps the memory of the hallucinatory architecture to which it might have belonged. The stone still resonates and vibrates, it emits a painful and indecipherable bliss, one no longer knows whose and for whom …

Jacques Derrida, from an interview

When so many blogs – 3 year projects, 5 year ones (how I dislike the word ‘project’!) have finished, I would like to remember a wonderfully unreasonable post from This Space:

Since a certain point at the weekend, I’ve been wondering what on earth I might write about here to break the silence. I feel that the silence must be broken, if only to displace the increasing desperation of the most recent entry. Also, whenever I see a blog whose latest entry is somewhat previous to the present date, I wonder: what on earth has the blogger been doing instead? From this glorious vantage point, it looks like bugger all. It looks like haughty neglect. I am offended. I take it as an affront. To what, I’m not sure.

I particularly dislike posts informing the loyal reader that the blogger is ‘taking a break’. They always announce that they’re taking a break ‘for a while’. I want to know, taking a break from what? When I write my blog, it feels like the break itself. A break like a fag break at work. Like a break gazing out of the window at the passing world. Like the breaking moments after some bad news. Like the gap between switching the TV off and getting up to go to bed. Like the time after writing. A blog goes on.

Still, I quite like the obscurity of the reason for the offence I take and the bitterness I harbour. Perhaps it makes it appear more profound; the truth is so deep and so tangled that should it ever emerge it must surely provide a revelation about this new medium; a truth glistening like a whatever emerges glistening from the unseeable depths. A big fish from a river perhaps. A screaming baby from a womb. A stream of water from a tap (such as when the sun shines through it). And, I have to say, I also quite enjoy cultivating grudges. Apart from very mild grudges against regular posters who announce that they’re ‘taking a break’ (‘for a while’), I also hold many strong grudges. Most of them are political. Many more sporting (or rather, unsporting). Some are literary. All too numerous to mention. But I’ve mentioned the latter regularly throughout this blog. They constitute this blog. Apart, that is, from the enthusiasms. Here’s an example: a review of Geoff Dyer’s new book about photography The Ongoing Moment written for the estimable Ready Steady Book.

‘Hope: the following page. Do not close the book.’

‘I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope.’

‘Perhaps hope is the book.’

Edmund Jabès (link)

As I started to write The Book of Questions, I got the impression that the culture I had relied on so far was violently cracking up. At any rate, I felt that it was no longer able to channel the anxieties I was harbouring. I no longer belonged – and foresaw that I would have to ground my writing in this not-belonging. Ragged phrases, shards of dialogues slowly surfaced – but as if from an anterior memory. Without knowing it, I was listening to a book rejecting all books and which I obviously did not master. I was interrogating this book even as I was writing it, expecting that it would create itself through the interrogation itself. But was it one book or were there innumerable books inside the book, from which its form, its ruptures, come? In a way I had to track the book beyond its ruptures, to where it has no longer any belonging or place or resemblance, where therefore it escapes all categories and traditions.

Edmund Jabès (link), translated by Pierre Joris.

The obligation to express is omnipresent in Beckett’s work[….] To my knowledge, Beckett has always refrained from speaking about the source of or the reason for this obligation.

Asja Szafraniec

[T]o begin to love life, to know birth. Including my own…. A new rule of life: to breathe without writing, from now on, to breathe beyond writing…. [W]ithout writing, without phrase, without murder…. Beyond the instinct of death, beyond the instinct of power and mastery. Writing without writing. Another writing, the other of writing, the altered writing, the one that has always traversed mine in silence.

Derrida, La Veilleuse, via.

The novel [Jabès] explains […] is the very opposite of the book. While the novelist exercises control over the writing, while he or she turns the space of the text into the space of the story to be retold, the writer of the book allows the writing to dominate. The book ‘recounts’ or, more precisely, activates not a story but the movement of writing.

The novelist masters his or her writing in order to put it at the service of the characters. By imposing on the novel a word that is manifestly exterior to the writing, the novelist assassinates the book. Ignorant of the rhythm and respiration puncturing the book’s circular and enigmatic writing, the novelist is word-deaf. He or she does not know, as does the writer of the book, how to listen to the page and to the reverberations of its whiteness and silence.

The true writer, who is not a creator but a listener, is sensitive to the book’s orality, to its freedom as uninterrupted language, to the void and silence that hide within it, to its rejection of closure, and, above all, to the invisible, forgotten, absent, always virtual book it shelters.

Richard Stamelman

Extreme fatigue goes quite as far as ecstasy, except that with fatigue you descend toward the extremities of knowledge.

It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

E.M. Cioran

Henry Green published his last novel, Doting, at forty seven. He drafts and redrafts a political farce, writes a couple of lacklustre stories, begins and drops a second volume of autobiography. Then he contributes a piece to The Spectator from which this is a heartbreaking excerpt:

Green can write novels, but his present difficulty is to know quite how to do it. As Time magazine says, Green is ailing, which means he has several things wrong with him which, rising sixty, is perhaps to be expected.

The same omnibus volume contains a movingly sad memoir of Green’s final years (he died at sixty-eight in 1973) by his son. There’s also a fabulous interview with Terry Southern:

Q.: Do you believe that a writer should work toward the development of a particular style?

A.: He can’t do anything else. His style is himself, and we are all of us changing every day – developing, we hope! We leave our marks behind us like a snail.

Advice on critics/ trolls from a biography of William Burroughs:

Never refute or answer the critic, thought Burroughs. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles.

Barthes on style:

… imagery, delivery, vocabulary spring from the body and the past of the writer and gradually become the very reflexes of his art. Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author’s personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of words and things take place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed.

Whatever its sophistication, style has always something crude about it: it is a form with no clear destination, the product of a thrust, not an intention, and, as it were, a vertical and lonely dimension of thought. Its frame of reference is biological or biographical, not historical: it is the writer’s ‘thing’, his glory and his prison, it is his solitude.

Indifferent to society and transparent to it, a closed personal process, it is in no way the product of a choice or of a reflection on Literature. It is the private portion of the ritual, it rises up from the writer’s myth-laden depths and unfolds beyond his area of control. It is the decorative voice of hidden, secret flesh; it works as does Necessity, as if, in this kind of floral growth, style were no more than the outcome of a blind and stubborn metamorphosis starting from a sub-language elaborated where flesh and external reality come together. Style is properly speaking a germinative, the transmutation of a Humour.   

In ‘The Autobiographer as Torero’, Michel Leiris discusses the reasons he felt moved to write Manhood as ‘the negation of a novel’; it is not to be anything but a condensation of ‘facts and images’ in their unpolished rawness. He continues:

Already a trail had been blazed for me in this direction by André Breton’s Nadja, but I dreamed above all of making my own that project Baudelaire was inspired to undertake after reading a passage in Poe’s Marginalia: to lay bare one’s heart, to write that book about oneself in which the concern for sincerity would be carried to such lengths that, under the author’s sentences, ‘the paper would shrivel and flare at each touch of his fiery pen’.

Tim Cawkwell on Bresson from an interesting interview:

So, if you’re a monk, a medieval monk, you have to go to services seven times a day. Imagine what it’s like. You get bored. Of course you can drop out mentally but you keep going. The spiritual life – and this is true of Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism – is about the progress of the soul. Which means going through hard labour, regular practice, doing it all the time. And getting better all the time. And I think Bresson’s practice is his filmmaking. Keep working to get it right. Keep practising to get it right.

You start with Les Anges du Peche and you end up with l’Argent. It’s a continuous process, undertaken with continuous practice and through asceticism. And in religion, of course, this is what comes out. You engage in the ritual all the time and then, suddenly, a spiritual experience happens. Certain conditions arise which could only have arisen because you’ve been there, waiting for them as it were[….] It’s the moment of illumination you’ve been waiting for. Well, with religion it’s a bit like that. I go to the Eucharist each Sunday. Sometimes it’s boring and other times I get a real insight, a powerful experience. And that’s just at a very prosaic level.

I do think that, in the monastic life, or the life of the hermit, you wait for God to happen. And I think Bresson’s filmmaking is like that. He’s waiting for the special moment and that’s why, I think, he puts his actors, or models, through that automatism. What was the Montaigne quotation again?

JH – “The movements of the soul were born with same progression as those of the body.” Although Bresson later expands on this elsewhere I think, “Only… if it’s automatic.”

TC – So Bresson is waiting for the magic to happen. And maybe he’s trying to help the magic happen, or is waiting for it to happen, in each shot. I can see Claude Laydu in le Journal as Bresson’s paradigm case. He’s a wonderful find. Laydu has this wonderful quality to him, in almost every shot.

‘God gives death the dimensions of His absence.

The book veils itself in the book. As God does in God.’

and

‘A great love carries within it a mourning for love.’

Edmund Jabès (link)

Jean Genet, from various interviews.

I would indeed like to free myself from all conventional morals, those that have hardened and crystallised and that impede growth, that impede life. But an artist is never completely destructive. The very concern with creating a harmonious sentence supposes a morality, that is a relation between the author and a possible reader. I write in order to be read. No one writes for nothing. In every aesthetics there is a morality.

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude? A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

[On The Maids] A critic said that maids ‘don’t speak that way’. They do speak that way, to me, when I’m alone at midnight.

I will hazard an explanation: writing is the last recourse when you have been betrayed. There’s something else I’d like to say to you: I realised very quickly, as young as fourteen or fifteen, that all I could be was a vagabond and a thief, not a good thief, but a thief all the same. I think my only success in the social world was or could have been along the lines of a ticket inspector on a bus, or a butcher’s assistant. And since this kind of success horrified me, I think that I trained myself at a very young age to have emotions that could only lead me in the direction of writing. If writing means experiencing such strong emotions or feelings that your entire life is marked out by them, if they are so strong that only their description, their evocation, or their analysis can really allow you to deal with them, then yes, it was at Mettray, and at fifteen years old, that I began to write.

Writing is perhaps what remains to you when you’ve been driven from the realm of the given world.

E.M. Cioran:

We are increasingly interested not in what an author says but in what he may have meant, not in his actions but in his projects, less in his actual work than in the work he dreamed of. If Mallarmé intrigues us, it is because he fulfills the conditions of the writer who is unrealised in relation to the disproportionate ideal he has assigned himself[….] We are adepts of the work that is aborted, abandoned halfway through, impossible to complete, undermined by its very requirements. The strange thing in this case is that the work was not even begun, for of The Book, that rival of the Universe, there remains virtually no revealing clue; it is doubtful that its structure was outlined in the notes Mallarmé destroyed, those that have survived being unworthy of our attention. Mallarmé: an impulse of thought, a thought that was never actualised, that snagged itself on the potential, on the unreal, disengaged from all actions, superior to all objects, even to all concepts – an expectation of thought.

A little later, Cioran notes that whereas Baudelaire called Poe a ‘hero’ of letters, Mallarmé went further and called him ‘the absolute literary case’, and comments,

No one today would assent to such a judgement, but that is of no consequence, for each individual (like each epoch) possesses reality only by his exaggerations, by his capacity to overestimate – by his gods.