If you must write, you must do it in the face of all opposition. […] Do not spend too much more time on culture & reading, these are traps. When everything conspires to make the thing impossible, when you are tired, worried, with no time, or money, it is then that things get done.
Samuel Beckett to Claude Raimbourg, 3 May 1954
Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.
Virginia Woolf
Quotations from other writers on the same subject are published in an article by Jennie Nash in HuffPost – Arts & Culture.
The last night I spent in London, I took some girl or other to the movies and, through her mediation, I paid you a little tribute of spermatozoa, Tristessa.
A late show, a crowded cinema. The drunks all stubbornly remained unmoved and jeered, laughed and catcalled throughout your film though sibilantly hushed by pairs of sentimental queers who, hand in hand, had come to pay homage to the one woman in the world who most perfectly expressed a particular pain they felt as deeply as, more deeply than, any woman, a pain whose nature I could not then define although it was the very essence of your magic. The film stock was old and scratched, as if the desolating passage of time were made visible in the rain upon the screen, audible in the worn stuttering of the sound track, yet those erosions of temporality only enhanced your luminous presence since they made it all the more forlorn, the more precarious your specious triumph over time. For you were just as beautiful as you had been twenty years before, would always be so beautiful as long as celluloid remained in complicity with the phenomenon of persistence of vision; but that triumph would die of duration in the end, and the surfaces that preserved your appearance were already wearing away.
Love In the Asylum
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birdsBolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering cloudsYet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skiesShe sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.Dylan Thomas
We were at the Young Vic yesterday to see Juliet Stevenson as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Buried up to her middle in act one, and up to her neck in act two, Winnie is involved in a relentless battle against solitude and silence.
