The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

Arthur Phillips

Categorized in : Art Common Truth Is

He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.

Arthur Phillips

reflection night fall

The strangest thing. I came to the end of other people so quickly. Each new person was like a glass of water, and at the beginning I was parched, but then each glass tasted a little worse, the water was grittier, and by the end even the first sip was enough to make me gag, you know?

Arthur Phillips

glasses water people

It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location.

Arthur Phillips

easier location ifs

How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something

Arthur Phillips

conditions resolve stable

Love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies. There's always SOMETHING after happily ever after.

Arthur Phillips

stories love-is lying

But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism.

Arthur Phillips

snobbery minimum music-is

You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.

Arthur Phillips

stupid want night

There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement.

Arthur Phillips

arrangements contemplation order

I'm an aesthetic empiricist. If you like something, it doesn't matter who made it. There really is no objective standard other than your own taste. You develop your own tastes, you find things that do or do not fit your tastes, and therefore are or are not 'good.' Whether they have been labeled as produced by the right person is another matter.

Arthur Phillips

good you right-person aesthetic

The memoir industry is, what's the word? Under regulated. I think it needs to be pruned. If there are too many books right now and the market for readers is shrinking, I think we can get rid of many of the memoirs. Another memoir should be awfully well justified before it gets published.

Arthur Phillips

right well now think

I do worry that it's impossible to write something original, that there's nothing that a human hasn't already thought of. But I can put it out of my mind and get on with what I'm doing.

Arthur Phillips

nothing i-can mind impossible

I like Shakespeare. I like some of his work a lot.

Arthur Phillips

his some like work

When a character bears the same name as the author it's just an invitation to have some fun.

Arthur Phillips

name some fun character

Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?

Arthur Phillips

great me life art

Fiction isn't memoir and memoir isn't fiction.

Arthur Phillips

memoir fiction

As a rule, I am lazy and prefer to avoid anything resembling work, and research feels like work, as opposed to my strong suit, which is sitting around making things up.

Arthur Phillips

i-am strong research work

I am notorious for always having two beagles with me, in any and all circumstances.

Arthur Phillips

i-am me always circumstances

Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.

Arthur Phillips

end you enjoy business

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

Arthur Phillips

american hard influence literature