Ada Hoffmann > Recent Status Updates

"Moreover, what's important about each new piece is not whether it is better or worse than your previous efforts, but the ways in which it is similar or different. The meaningful comparison between two Bach fugues is not how they rank, but how they work."

"Most of what we inherit is so clearly correct it goes unseen. It fits the world seamlessly. It is the world. But despite its richness and variability, the well-defined world we inherit doesn't quite fit each one of us, individually... And so you make your place in the world by making part of it-by contributing some new part to the set... Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done."

Some random thoughts about this book: https://twitter.com/xasymptote/status...

Just going through the proofs :)

"'Artist' has gradually become a form of identity which (as every artist knows) often carries with it as many drawbacks as benefits. Consider that if artist equals self, then when (inevitably) you make flawed art, you are a flawed person, and when (worse yet) you make no art, you are no person at all!"

Re-reading this. It continues to get me where I live.

DNFing. I was curious about Byron but this got very annoying very fast.

"Own your work. No matter how it looks now, remember that when you wrote it, it lit up the page and melted the pen. Self-hate is a waste of time."

"Part of the reason fantasy is so reviled, I think, is because it gives us this idea that the world is more than what we're given, that it can be anything, that the rough material of work and hard going is not the whole substance of this universe. Dreamers don't make good workers. So you teach them that no matter how miserable, what they've got is the best, and the Other is terror and lies."