Hamish Low

"There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical. I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer....I felt this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that’s forceful in a young writer, it can make you cry. It’s just clear tears; it’s not grimacing or being contorted, it’s just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting into what it has seen. This continues in the poet. It may be repressed in some way, but I think we continue in all our lives to have that sense of melting, of the “I” not being important. That is the ecstasy. It doesn’t happen as much when you get older.....It’s not that mystic. Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: “Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.” That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature. I’ve always felt that sense of gratitude. I’ve never felt equal to it in terms of my writing, but I’ve never felt that I was ever less than that....."

Derek Walcott in The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 37

"We alter the atmospheric makeup of the entire world: half of us pretend it’s not happening, the other half immediately start looking for new machines that will reverse it. This is how empires work, particularly when they have started to decay. Denial, displacement, anger, fear."

~ Paul Kingsnorth
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6599

Lisa Gerrard discusses the music for Samsara
www.barakasamsara.com/updates/lisa-gerrard-discusses-music-samsara

Interviewer - You’re known for your multi-narrative approach to screenwriting. Is there a reason you always go with this format?
Guillermo Arriaga - Chekhov used to say ‘you write what you can, not what you want’ and, you know, first I have ADD, which is more or less the way I think. Second, telling stories in a disorderly way is the way we tell stories, naturally. I don’t know why some critics in their ridiculous way say that this is artificial. I have never in my life, never, listened to someone tell his story in real life in three acts.

Guillermo Arriaga - Interview
Cinema Blend- 17/09/09

"I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves....I know that if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream."

"Imagination is the shortest route between any two conceivable points."

~ J.G. Ballard in The Art of Fiction No. 85 - The Paris Review

Literature and Latte have kindly released a fully functional native Linux beta version of Scrivener. Fully revolutionises my writing process.

Focuswriter is also an indispensible and elegant piece of software...

"One of the motives for being an artist is to recreate a condition where you're actually out of your depth, where you're uncertain, no longer controlling yourself, yet you're generating something, like surfing as opposed to digging a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity is necessary, but what artists like, if they still like what they're doing, is the surfing"

~ Brian Eno ("Aurora Musicalis". ArtForum Magazine. 24:10. 1986)

"A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality."

~ Robert Louis Stevenson, from An Apology for Idlers

" There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are."

~ Somerset Maugham