Goodreads helps you follow your favorite authors. Be the first to learn about new releases!
Start by following James Richardson.
Showing 1-30 of 44
“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?”
―
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?”
―
“Sophistication is upscale conformity.”
―
―
“You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.”
―
―
“There are silences harder to take back than words.”
―
―
“Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. ”
―
―
“Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?”
―
―
“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.”
― Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
― Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
“All work is the avoidance of harder work.”
― Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
― Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
“What is more yours than what always holds you back?”
―
―
“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.”
― Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms
― Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms
“I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.”
― Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms
― Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms
“It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.”
―
―
“If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.”
―
―
“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.”
― Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
― Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
“Here in the last minutes, the very end of the world, someone's tightening a screw thinner than an eyelash, someone with slim wrists is straightening flowers...”
―
―
“Though now, of all that could have been, there is nothing.”
― By the Numbers
― By the Numbers
“If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.”
― Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
― Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
“this is the last house in summer
and now is the double loneliness
of missing a party you don't even want to be at.”
― By the Numbers
and now is the double loneliness
of missing a party you don't even want to be at.”
― By the Numbers
“Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.”
―
―
“Loving yourself is about as likely as tickling yourself.”
― By the Numbers
― By the Numbers
“You look up from an oldish author:
Is he dead?
Such power we have,
not knowing. Let him live.”
― By the Numbers
Is he dead?
Such power we have,
not knowing. Let him live.”
― By the Numbers
“We don't have to be anywhere. The party we left
and the one we were headed to are probably over.”
― By the Numbers
and the one we were headed to are probably over.”
― By the Numbers
“I look over my old books, happiest when I find a line it seems I could not have written.”
― By the Numbers
― By the Numbers
“A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.”
―
―
“Bitterness is a greater failure than failure”
―
―
“As for my writing. I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going”
―
―
“Late Aubade"
after Hardy
So what do you think, Life, it seemed pretty good to me,
though quiet, I guess, and unspectacular.
It’s been so long, I don’t know any more how these things go.
I don’t know what it means that we’ve had this time together.
I get that the coffee, the sunlight on glassware, the Sunday paper
and our studious lightness, not hearing the phone, are iconic
of living regretless in the Now. A Cool that’s beyond me:
I’m having some trouble acting suitably poised and ironic.
It’s sensible to be calm, not to make too much of a little thing
and just see what happens, as I think you are saying
with your amused look, sipping and letting me monologue,
and young as you are, Life, you would know: you have done it all.
If I get up a little reluctantly, tapping my wallet, keys, tickets,
I’m giving you time to say Stay, it’s a dream
that you’re old—no one notices—years never happened—
but I see you have already given me all that you can.
Those clear eyes are ancient; you’ve done this with billions of others,
but you are my first life, Life. I feel helplessly young.
I’m a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions:
are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?”
― During
after Hardy
So what do you think, Life, it seemed pretty good to me,
though quiet, I guess, and unspectacular.
It’s been so long, I don’t know any more how these things go.
I don’t know what it means that we’ve had this time together.
I get that the coffee, the sunlight on glassware, the Sunday paper
and our studious lightness, not hearing the phone, are iconic
of living regretless in the Now. A Cool that’s beyond me:
I’m having some trouble acting suitably poised and ironic.
It’s sensible to be calm, not to make too much of a little thing
and just see what happens, as I think you are saying
with your amused look, sipping and letting me monologue,
and young as you are, Life, you would know: you have done it all.
If I get up a little reluctantly, tapping my wallet, keys, tickets,
I’m giving you time to say Stay, it’s a dream
that you’re old—no one notices—years never happened—
but I see you have already given me all that you can.
Those clear eyes are ancient; you’ve done this with billions of others,
but you are my first life, Life. I feel helplessly young.
I’m a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions:
are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?”
― During
“Hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind
banging and banging itself to pieces.”
― By the Numbers
banging and banging itself to pieces.”
― By the Numbers
“She started reading novels to put herself in the way of secret lives.”
― By the Numbers
― By the Numbers
