Words Of Wisdom
WRITING
"Listen to the quiet voices in your head."
John Patrick Shanley, Tennessee Williams Literary Festival
"We who are writers write for one simple reason - not only to save the world or have others behave a certain way...we do it because it is our nature."
Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams Literary Festival
"Of course a play exists on the page: these things exist in their creation."
Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams Literary Festival
"I'm a poet. And then I put poetry in the drama. I put it in the short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know."
Tennessee Williams
"I believe that the way to write a good play is to convince yourself that it is easy to do - then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan - till the first draft is finished. Then Calvary - but not till then. Doubt - and be lost - until the first draft is finished. A play is a Phoenix - it dies a thousand deaths."
Tennessee Williams
"Her profession was words and she believed in them deeply. The articulation, interpretation, appreciation, and preservation of good words...Words could incite, soothe, destroy, exorcise, redeem."
Gail Godwin, The Odd Woman, 1974
"Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind...To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them onto paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing."
Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures, 1936
NEW ORLEANS
"Every time I go to New Orleans, I am startled by something."
Roy Blount, Jr. Feet on the Street: Rambles About New Orleans
"New Orleans. A courtesan, not old and yet no longer young, who shuns the sunlight that the illusion of her former glory be preserved. The mirrors in her house are dim and frames are tarnished; all her house is dim and beautiful with age. She reclines gracefully upon a dull brocaded chaise-lounge, there is the scent of incense about her, and her draperies are arranged in formal folds. She lives in an atmosphere of a bygone and more gracious era. And those whom she receives are few in number, and they come to her through an eternal twilight. She does not talk much herself, yet seems to dominate the conversation...And those who are not of the elect must stand forever without her portals.New Orleans...a courtesan whose hold is strong upon the mature, to whose charm the young must respond.And all who leave her...return to her when she smiles across her languid fan."
William Faulkner, New Orleans Sketches, 1925
"On a bad day, I creep out to the street and feel as if I'm living in Disneyland, surrounded by Haiti. Yet on good days, I crack open the gate of the ramshackle fence that hides the courtyard where I live, and step into the only place that has ever felt like home. Like layers of paint peeling from an old building, history reveals itself at every turn of my stroll...Like wisteria vines around a wrought-iron fence, only the truly twisted stay rooted here...the eternal Quarter exists as a place in the imagination that imbues these worn bricks and rotting boards with magic."
James Nolan, "Quarter Rats", French Quarter Fiction
"The French Quarter in New Orleans...the type of place where people are drinking beer at ten o'clock in the morning, and the trash has not been picked up from the night before, and the whole place basically has the air of a bordello...But it is home, of course, and that makes all the difference, for in that there is redemption...All the ghosts of those you most have loved are there, and it is overpowering. The whole place peopled with ghosts, and maybe oneor two who accompany you everywhere you go."
Nancy Lemann, Malaise
"New Orleans, the city that dreams stories. Ghosts and pirates...are thick as the morning fog on certain days in New Orleans. The dead pass casually by. [New Orleans] is an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked...a feeling that the mysteries of night could go on forever and that there is little difference between life and death except for poetry and song...everyone, dead or alive, returns to New Orleans. The city can drive a sober-minded person insane, but it feeds the dreamer. It feeds the dreamer stories, music, and food. Really great food."
Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans Stories
"New Orleans is a great city because it nurtures that indefinable essence that drives us to identify ourselves, to delve deep into our souls and discover that thing in life which puts us on an emotional roll. And that emotional roll in turn is the magic which drives us to be outselves"
Paul Prudhomme
"Listen to the quiet voices in your head."
John Patrick Shanley, Tennessee Williams Literary Festival
"We who are writers write for one simple reason - not only to save the world or have others behave a certain way...we do it because it is our nature."
Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams Literary Festival
"Of course a play exists on the page: these things exist in their creation."
Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams Literary Festival
"I'm a poet. And then I put poetry in the drama. I put it in the short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know."
Tennessee Williams
"I believe that the way to write a good play is to convince yourself that it is easy to do - then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan - till the first draft is finished. Then Calvary - but not till then. Doubt - and be lost - until the first draft is finished. A play is a Phoenix - it dies a thousand deaths."
Tennessee Williams
"Her profession was words and she believed in them deeply. The articulation, interpretation, appreciation, and preservation of good words...Words could incite, soothe, destroy, exorcise, redeem."
Gail Godwin, The Odd Woman, 1974
"Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind...To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them onto paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing."
Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures, 1936
NEW ORLEANS
"Every time I go to New Orleans, I am startled by something."
Roy Blount, Jr. Feet on the Street: Rambles About New Orleans
"New Orleans. A courtesan, not old and yet no longer young, who shuns the sunlight that the illusion of her former glory be preserved. The mirrors in her house are dim and frames are tarnished; all her house is dim and beautiful with age. She reclines gracefully upon a dull brocaded chaise-lounge, there is the scent of incense about her, and her draperies are arranged in formal folds. She lives in an atmosphere of a bygone and more gracious era. And those whom she receives are few in number, and they come to her through an eternal twilight. She does not talk much herself, yet seems to dominate the conversation...And those who are not of the elect must stand forever without her portals.New Orleans...a courtesan whose hold is strong upon the mature, to whose charm the young must respond.And all who leave her...return to her when she smiles across her languid fan."
William Faulkner, New Orleans Sketches, 1925
"On a bad day, I creep out to the street and feel as if I'm living in Disneyland, surrounded by Haiti. Yet on good days, I crack open the gate of the ramshackle fence that hides the courtyard where I live, and step into the only place that has ever felt like home. Like layers of paint peeling from an old building, history reveals itself at every turn of my stroll...Like wisteria vines around a wrought-iron fence, only the truly twisted stay rooted here...the eternal Quarter exists as a place in the imagination that imbues these worn bricks and rotting boards with magic."
James Nolan, "Quarter Rats", French Quarter Fiction
"The French Quarter in New Orleans...the type of place where people are drinking beer at ten o'clock in the morning, and the trash has not been picked up from the night before, and the whole place basically has the air of a bordello...But it is home, of course, and that makes all the difference, for in that there is redemption...All the ghosts of those you most have loved are there, and it is overpowering. The whole place peopled with ghosts, and maybe oneor two who accompany you everywhere you go."
Nancy Lemann, Malaise
"New Orleans, the city that dreams stories. Ghosts and pirates...are thick as the morning fog on certain days in New Orleans. The dead pass casually by. [New Orleans] is an intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked...a feeling that the mysteries of night could go on forever and that there is little difference between life and death except for poetry and song...everyone, dead or alive, returns to New Orleans. The city can drive a sober-minded person insane, but it feeds the dreamer. It feeds the dreamer stories, music, and food. Really great food."
Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans Stories
"New Orleans is a great city because it nurtures that indefinable essence that drives us to identify ourselves, to delve deep into our souls and discover that thing in life which puts us on an emotional roll. And that emotional roll in turn is the magic which drives us to be outselves"
Paul Prudhomme