"I'm not interested in attacking, I'm interested in astonishing."
Notes to Self are longer journal entries from Seven Yrs Ago. I was 21 mid-2014.
“When you write a novel or a story, you don’t know where it’s going, and you don’t do it for money, and you don’t do it because someone says, ‘We’ll print it if you do it, and we’ll pay for it. You may do it out of some weird principle, or when you get a surge of some inexplicable feeling, or the way certain people just fall into a habit of getting up, having breakfast, and then starting to write. But you do it because it’s a kick, and so there’s no telling where it will go.” —Terry Southern, The Paris Review
“The only excuse for writing a novel these days is if it can’t be done as a movie.” [books can do interior monologues + 1st person narratives]
“Letter writing is the best writing of all, because it’s the purest. It’s like writing to yourself, but you’ve got an excuse to do it because this other person will dig it.”
“New York writers are very suspicious of people who spend any time in Los Angeles. Most of them don’t get invited, and they’re sort of hurt and confused by it.”
“I’m not interested in attacking, I’m interested in astonishing. Lenny Bruce was one of the great astonishers, and he was a very gentle, mild person. He didn’t lead any protest marches or anything—what was funny to him was the irony of the smugness and so on, and he deflated it, because it’s funny to see it deflated. Of course he was very conscious of injustices and absurdities, like any sensitive person, and that came out as an attack, but it wasn’t his motivation.”
For commentary seven years later, go here.