Where you stand depends on where you sit

“Memory is like fiction; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t there anymore. You’re left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable.”

— Haruki Murakami, “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon,” The Elephant Vanishes

What you don’t see

You see that couple sitting on the next table — They look fine — They could just be saying, ‘Yeah, my brother’s buying a new shop,’ or she could be saying, ‘You know what? I can’t do this any more. I’m leaving in three days and I’m not coming back.’ And the other person might have been planning his whole life on that person staying, so he has a broken heart inside. But you can’t see it.

— Erlend Øye, quoted in Norwegian Blues, 2004.

Not today

I think as you get older, when things go wrong it hurts so much, and we question our ability to write any decent music so much, that it’s very easy just to put down your tools and say, ‘I’m not doing it today’. We could drift for months and months and months.

— Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, quoted in ‘It’s not wonderful at all – it’s horrible’, 2008.

A pain that’s heaven

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

“Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers,” I said, with a chuckle.
“I have no talent.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
He gave me his radiant, fascinating smile.
“Loaf,” he said.