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Re: to all, from Linford

Linford:

I'm sure you are already acquainted with my good friend Madeleine, but
because she has mirrored my soul time and time I again, I send her words to
you.  They may stay with you, or rest elsewhere, but for now, here they
sit...

"Whether a story is to be marketed for grown-ups or for children, the writer
writes for himself, out of his own need, otherwise the story will lack
reality.  There is no topic which is of itself taboo; if it springs from the
writer's need to understand life and all its vagaries and vicissitudes, if
it is totally honest and unselfpitying, then it will have the valid ring of
truth.  If it is written because it is what is at the moment fashionable,
and not out of the writer's need, then it is apt to be unbelievable..."
 
"It seems that more than ever the compulsion today is to identify, to reduce
someone to what is on the label.  To identify is to control, to limit.  To
love is to call by name, and so open the wide gates of creativity.  But we
forget names, and turn to labels...if we are pigeon-holed and labeled we are
un-named."

"...There is no evading the fact that the artist yearns for 'success',
because that means that there has been a communication of the vision:  that
all the struggle has not been invalid.  Yet with each book I write I am
weighted with a deep longing for anonymity, a feeling that books should not
be signed, reviews should not be read.  But I sign the books; I read the
reviews."

"To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.  If the
artist is to be able to listen to the work, he must get out of the way; or,
more correctly, since getting out of the way is not a do-it-yourself
activity, he must be willing to be got out of the way, to be killed to self
in order to become a servant of the work."

~ Madeleine L'Engle

Whatever you do with this paradox you're faced with, my thanks to you will
always remain.  With OtR, I'm a little less alone, and much closer to the
sky.

Candace