James Richardson

“All work is the avoidance of harder work.”

“To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.”

“It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.”

“It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.”

“Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.”

“You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.”

“If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.”

“What is more yours than what always holds you back?”

“Sophistication is upscale conformity.”

“I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.”

“There are silences harder to take back than words.”

“Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.”

“Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. ”

“On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays 1. A beginning ends what an end begins. 2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself. 4. The best time is stolen time.5. All work is the avoidance of harder work. 6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music.8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation. 10. Writer: how books read each other.11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love. 12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything.13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough.14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.15. There are silences harder to take back than words.16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do. 21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of.22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open).24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?”

“Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?”