- Books, Quotes, Reading, Writing

“Art permits the dangerous.”

R.I.P., Jonathan Baumbach. Here are some quotes from the writer.

“The books of mine I like best are the ones I hardly recognize as products of my labor after they appear. That is, they come from some uncharted place inside that is smarter and more daring and more interesting than I am.”

“Now I come with some trepidation to the argument implicit in this piece. What’s fun about reading fiction that refuses to yield itself without a struggle? Ah, fun! Still, I think it reasonable to say that the more active we are as readers, the greater the potential satisfaction in the reading experience. It’s a bit like love, but isn’t everything that matters?

It is not the resolution of difficulty that the ideal reader we imagine for ourselves is after, but the nature of the mysterious, mysteriousness itself.”

“Reading itself, reading anything, is an ambitious act in an age dominated by visual media. Even the simplest books require the translation of language into thought and image. Still what’s the point of reading work that is like television when television is tastier, more easily digested, and less time-consuming. If one reads books at all, shouldn’t one go for an experience one can’t get from TV or movies or anywhere else. Taking the trouble to read, perhaps we ought to go for something that throws our whole way of seeing into question.”

“We are continually offered the cliche that there is nothing new by people who want to believe the new is really just the same old thing shrewdly disguised in this year’s marketing strategy.”

“Originality tends to generate difficulty in that it breaks faith with expectation, undermines the prevailing verities of last season’s fashion. Originality, by definition, takes us by surprise. Surprise is one of the touchstones of art. Literary art is always somewhat difficult during our first unescorted encounter with it. It often arrives without fanfare and without self-defining context.”

“Media is a system of mirrors that tends to discover and honor whatever it offered for discovery and honor in the first place.”

“We are a culture in which the perception of something often counts for more than the thing itself.”

Censorship is never acceptable.”

One writes to discover a truth that is truer than what existed before.

 

 

 

 

 

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