I’ve never been lonely. I’ve been in a room —I’ve felt suicidal. I’ve been depressed. I’ve felt awful — awful beyond all — but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me…or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve always had this terrible itch for solitude. It’s being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I’ll quote Ibsen, “The strongest men are the most alone.” I’ve never thought, “Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I’ll feel good.” No, that won’t help. You know the typical crowd, “Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?” Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in factories. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s drink more wine!
- Charles Bukowski
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” ― Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was the man who made it clear to me, what it is to write, to truly write. This right now is how it is for me. But it goes both ways. I write, I bleed. I don’t write, I bleed. Either way, it’s something I need to do to stop the constant flow of shit in my head because once it’s all down it’s a lot easier to sort of go about the everyday things you need to get about doing.
On June 26, 1956, author C.S. Lewis responded to a fan letter from Joan Lancaster, a young Chronicles of Narnia enthusiast.
In a personalized thank-you letter, the writer imparted some simple and valuable stylistic advice for budding prose writers.
1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
You can read the rest of the letter @ Letters of Notes
These photos were published in a world press photo book called “Next #01”. The book has 12 Photographers, one of them being Kitra Cahana who caught my attention the most, showcasing their work on the theme “Respect”. The Photographers are fairly unknown and their photos are breathtaking.
Each photographer interprets respect in different ways. Some focus on the respect of the dead and living, respect between people and the environment, respecting other and self respects and respect for religion. And for some reason as you read thinking they all must have the same idea of what respect is, you couldn’t be more wrong.
It is a really brilliant book with not only amazing work but also interesting as respect is explained by people from different sides of globe that value and understand respect in totally different ways, who witnessed respect being given and received in completely different situations. However each photographer link in the sense that they each speak of something personal and private to themselves.
This is perhaps one of the greatest photography books I’ve read, it’s really fascinating.
