Teleidoscope

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction.  But the relationship between reading and writing is rarely so clear-cut…

To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light.  Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies.  The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own – a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.

Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer:  A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them  

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