Stefan Merrill Block quotes

“Before I published my first book, I worked for a while as a documentary and wedding/bar mitzvah videographer, and a part of me still mourns the lost filmmaker I'll never be. Working on a documentary is nearly the opposite artistic process to writing: as a writer you are always trying to fill out a world to fit your story, but as a documentarian your work is to carve a story out of the world. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly blocked at my computer, I miss the days when I could just point my camera at something interesting and wait to see what happens.”
-- Stefan Merrill Block

#Book Quotes #Writing Quotes #Interesting Quotes

“I think that I write much more naturally about characters in solitude than characters interacting with others. My natural inclination - and one that I've learned to push against - is to give primacy to a character's interior world. Over the three books that I've written, I've had to teach myself that not every feeling needs to be described and that often the most impactful writing more elegantly evokes those unnamed feelings through the way characters speak and behave.”
-- Stefan Merrill Block

#Book Quotes #Writing Quotes #Character Quotes

“I don't write because I think I have anything particularly interesting to say. I write because I love writing more than any other work I've done. I do think about entertaining the reader to the extent that I try always to write a book that I myself would want to read, but I don't think it's up for me to decide if what I've written is interesting to others. That is entirely up to others.”
-- Stefan Merrill Block

#Book Quotes #Writing Quotes #Thinking Quotes

“To her- Hand in hand we come Christopher Robin and I To lay this book in your lap. Say you're surprised? Say you like it? Say it's just what you wanted? Because it's yours- because we love you.”

“One has to ascertain the right path for his activities by following in the footsteps of great saintly persons and books of knowledge under the guidance of a spiritual master.”

“And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.”

“I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.”

Source : A. J. Jacobs (2004). “The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

“Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.”

“Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.”

“The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.”

Source : A. J. Liebling (2005). “Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer”, p.27, Macmillan

“I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.”

“As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.”

Source : Ad Reinhardt, Barbara Rose (1991). “Art-as-art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt”, p.86, Univ of California Press

“Yeah, I think speculation keeps things really interesting.”