Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

The actor is concerned with his own bit of it, but the director's somehow trying to work the whole thing into a much bigger picture. It's like conducting an orchestra.

Music runs through everything I do - I even think musically; even when I was acting, but, especially, when I am directing. Directing is very musical.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.

One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

I like writing melody without an instrument. It's just so - it's more like the choreography of a bee; you just go.

I shift between mediums very frequently. Instead of taking a break from writing, I just write in a different medium or in a different way or for a different purpose, so that I don't actually stop writing - I just go to something else. Like going from a big symphony to a piano piece is great and very refreshing, I find. And then going from that to a big concerto, and then having to go out and play.

I'm learning about filming, and just conceptualizing as well. I think it's a good artistic inroad, even to music as well.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.

When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything.

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.

Whatever I do today is the whole continuum of my experience. Like John Dewey said in his book ‘Art as Experience,’ you can’t separate experience from the work of art. So, if I write for the symphony today, you’re listening to everything that’s happened to me since I was 18 years old.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

I think that if you have a strong narrative, if the idea of the song can be boiled down to the basics, it won't change that much.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.