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Mingus was always a disaster to have around. I loved him, but he was worse than a child. He didn't know how to clean up behind himself. He could cook, but there would be eggs on the floor and the ceiling. Couldn't find his shoes when he had to go to work, didn't have a white shirt, couldn't write a check. All he could really do was play the bass and write.
--
Buddy Collette, as quoted in Central Avenue Sounds (1998), edited by Clora Bryant.

 

Charles Mingus

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Why can't a writer use writing as a painter uses paint? I try to. When I wrote The Tree of Man I felt I couldn't write about simple, illiterate people in a perfectly literate way; but in my present novel the language is more sophisticated. I think perhaps I have clarified my style quite a lot over the years. I find it a great help to hear the language going on around me; not that what I write, the narrative, is idiomatic Australian, but the whole work has a balance and rhythm which is influenced by what is going on around you. When you first write the narrative it might be unconscious, but when you come to work it over you do it more consciously. It gives what I am writing a greater feeling of reality.

 

Patrick (Australian novelist) White

 

... It sucked. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't even shop. Actually that's not true. I had gotten this amazing Marni backless dress down at Barneys the day before-but I didn't go really crazy like normal.

 

Nicole Richie

 

I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.

 

Woody Allen

 

That song is about a few other things as well. And Anita is one of them. I was breaking up with her around that time. I'd said, "Look, if we clean up together, we'll stay together". Well, I cleaned myself up. But she didn't. And I realized that I couldn't sleep with someone who had a needle beside the bed. I was too fragile at that point. I loved her, but I had to leave.

 

Anita Pallenberg

 

I was trying to solve the problem of this book. (My Life as a Man) When it seemed I never would, I stopped and wrote Our Gang; when I tried again and still couldn't write it, I stopped and wrote the baseball book; then while finishing the baseball book, I stopped to write The Breast. It was as though I were blasting my way through a tunnel to reach the novel I couldn't write. Each of one's books is a blast, clearing the way for what's next.

 

Philip Roth