All true artist, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no mind, from inner stillness.

p.24

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

p.30

Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn't disappeared. It's still there on the other side of the clouds.

p.30

Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against tit. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.

p.36

The secret to life is to 'die before you die' - and realise there is no death. 

p.46

When the compulsive striving away from the Now ceases, the joy of Being flows into everything you do. The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for fulfillment and satisfaction - you don't look to it for salvation because you are not attached to results.

p.68-69

I write the first draft of a novel in notebooks over a period of say two or three years, and then I spend about a couple of years editing them. I just keep going through it again and again and again. Each time, whatever doesn't interest me any more drops away. I keep adding, too, new stuff that interests me. So the first three years are spent trying to find the structure, find the story. There's a stage where you start compressing and pulling stuff away and adding stuff and realising you're looking at the text not as someone who is inventing a story, but who's trying to shape a story.

I reread nothing. I intentionally don't look at the stuff at all until I've finished the book. At that stage when you go back and reread for the first time, it's kind of horrific. But I don't want to have everything perfectly made before I take the next step. It seems like moving forward with armed guards. There isn't an element of danger or risk or that anything possible can happen in the next scene. Having a concept of what the book is exactla bout before you begin it is a tremendous limitation, because no idea is going to be as intricate and complicated as what you will discover in that process of writing it.

At some stage in the book, I'm very conscious of what almost every scene does, and I'll make it reflect the larger structure of the book, or fit into the larger structure, not just in a casual, accidental way. It may feel accidental, but it's there for a purpose. 

There are things like italics, or who speaks when, or when to go from Italy to England or India, or from character to charater, all that stuff is decided in the editing stage. There's no map I made beforehand. There's a map later on.

Michael Ondaatje, pp.213-214

As a writer I have found that the last two years of any book I work on are given over to its editing. I may have spent four or five years writing in the dark, but now I have to discover the shape of the object I have been struggling to make, its true organic shape, that figure in the carpet. I have made two documentary films, and my fictional works tend to follow this sturctural process: shooting or writing everything for a number of months or years, then shaping the content into a new form, till it is almost a newly discovered story. I move things around till they become sharp and clear, till they are in the right location. And it is at this stage that I discover the work's true voice and structure. When I edited my first film documatnary I knew that this was where the art came in. When I watched Walter Much at work during my peripheral involvement with the film of The English Patient, I know that this was the stage of filmmaking that was closest to the act of writing.

Michael Ondaatje, p.xviii

As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances of happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.

Walter Murch, p.9

There are some writers who have a plan before they sit down for those years of writing a book - they have a concept or plot that's very certain. These are good writers, who know exactly how the story will ened. I seem to have none of those asssurances. I'm much more uncertain, insecure almost in the way I'm continually being fed and diverted by the possibilities from the world around me - chance anecdotes overheard, the texture within a rumour - as much as by what my research reveals. For those four or five years, I collect such things, and they fall into a form or a shape or a situation I have established...the final stages of the war in Italy, the preparation for death by a gun-fighter...As I said, I don't have too much of a governor at work. So it's similar to what you say about the first pass at editing a film. When writing I reject nothing. I am much looser about that, much more accepting at that early stage.

I do this till I have a complete but rough first draft, by which time I've essentially discovered the story. I then put on a different hat - and I start eliminating the wrong notes, the repetitions, the trails that go nowhere. I start merging and tightening the work...at this stage three scenes can become one. I take this process as far as I can. There are numerous drafts...Eventually I try it out on my peers and my editor, and I try not to be too defensive about the work. I don't always agree with them, but their responses and notes are an essential stage for me. The only way I can get that democratic, communal sense is to be not so sure about what I have done. But it is also important that I don't show them the work until that stage is reached, until I've taken it as far as I can go. I don't want their influence to come too early in the process after my discovery of the story and the form. 

And until the last days I always know that this isn't the final draft. The whole tone can be changed or a problem solved by a small structural shift.

Michael Ondaatje, p.38

Some years ago I was reading an article by Donald Richie, about the difference between Eastern and Western film, or art. He was distinguishing between Eisenstein and, say, Kurosawa, and how they work, and how when Eisenstein edits he builds the scene, while Kurosawa erases and removes. The scene is revealed in a Kurosawa film, whereas in Eisenstein or in the Western tradition you're building a scene. Richie points out that the master shot - the shot that shows us the choreography of the whole scene - is traditionally the essential Western setup, the base, whereas in Japanese film, you can pick a small fragment of the corner of a table and that particular fragment can be used to suggest the whole scene.

Michael Ondaatje, p.107

O: There's a line of Saul Bellow's - 'I write to discover the next room of my fate.' In this way, I think, many novels are self-portraits, self-explorations, even if the story is set in an alien situation. You can try on this costume, that costume.

M: Somebody once asked W.H. Auden, 'Is it true that you can write only what you know?' And he said, 'Yes it is But you don't know what you know until you write it.' Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.

p. 128 

The analogy I came up with [to describe editing] was with the image of a room illuminated by a bare blue lightbulb. Let's say the intention is to have 'blueness' in this room, so when you walk in you see a bulb casting a blue light. And you think, This is the source of the blue, the source of all blueness. On the other hand, the lightbulb is so intense, so unshaded, that you squint. It's a harsh light. It's blue, but it's so much what it is that you have to shield yourself from it.

There are frequently scenes that are the metaphorical equivalent of that bulb. The scene is making the point so directly that you have to mentally squint. And when you think, What would happen if we got rid of that blue lightbulb, you wonder, But then where will the blue come from? Let's take it out and see. That's always the key: Let's just take it out and find out what happens.

So you unscrew the lightbulb...there are other sources of light in the room. And once that glaring source of light is gone, your eyes open up. The wonderful thing about vision is that when something is too intense, your irises close down to protect against it - as when you look at the sun. But when there is less light, your eye opens up and makes more of the light that is there.

So now that the blue light is gone and the light is more even you begin to see things that are authentically blue on their own account. Whereas before, you attributed their blueness to the bulb. And the blue that remains interacts with other colours in more interesting ways rather than just being an intense blue tonality.

That's probably as far as you can go with the analogy, but it happens often in films. You wind up taking out the very thing that you thought was the sole source of an idea. And when you take it out, you see that not only is the idea still present, it's more organically related to everything else.

In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the one thing that is never talked about is the reason, the real resaon, that Raskolnikov killed the landlady. If Dostoevsky actually explained why he killed her, everything else would be minimised and it would not be as interesting and complex. It reminds me of something my father said when people spoke about his paintings. He related it to a comment Wallace Stevens made: that the poem is not about anything at all, the poem is what it is. It's not there to illustrate a point.

Walter Murch, p.141

M: These are characters [those of the films he's worked on] played in a minor key, I'm interested in the minor key. They come at your sideways, whereas major-key characters come at your directly -

O: As in Spartacus.

M: Yes. I guess I am drawn to stories where you have to get under the skin of rather unlikely and sometimes unlikeable characters.

p. 173

When I was working on The English Patient one thing I did not want to read during research was great desert writers. I intentionally didn't read Thessinger or Doughty or Lawrence. I was mostly reading essays full of data about the surface of the earth at the Royal Georgraphical Society. Articles discussing sand dune formations, the depth of certain wells that could be relied upon during a trek. 

Michael Ondaatje, p. 204

After working on my first long book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I needed to turn away from words, from my own brain's vocabulary. So I made a documentary film. I've done that a couple of times - worked in film or theatre or dance - so I would eventually come back to literature with a refreshed sense of language. A new voice.

Michael Ondaatje, p.215

Francis [Coppola] is a practitioner of and is fascinated by the human and technical process of making the film. George [Lucas], in comparison, is somebody who has a complete vision of the film in his head. For him, the problem becomes how to get that vision, practically, onto the screen, in as unadulterated a form as possible.

Both approaches involve a process. But the most important disctinction is whether you allow the process to become an active collaborator in the making of the film, or use it as a machine and try and restrict its contributions. [...] Any variation from it is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. The other approach - Francis's, for example - is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in the filmmmaker's mind when he began.

Walter Murch, pp. 216-217 

There's that wonderful line of Rilke's, 'The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.' Recognising that all our achievements are doomed, in one sense - the earth will be consumed by the sun in a billion years or so - but in another sense the purpose of our journey is to go father each time. So you're trying things out in every film you make, with the potential of failure. I think we're always failing, in Rilke's sense - we know there's more potential that we haven't realised. But because we're trying, we develop more and more talent, or muscles, or strategies to improve, each time.

Every film has lessons to teach us - if we receive those lessons in the right way.

Walter Murch, p. 307

And there's always something I remember in a previous book that I was not able to get right. That's what I somehow carry with me into the next work - I'll have to deal with that the next time. There was a moment in In the Skin of a Lion that I couldn't quite get - to do with the death of Ambrose Small and his strange solitude during his last days. Now I can look back and see that much of Almasy's situation in The English Patient came from that 'lack' in the earlier book.

Michael Ondaatje, p.309

For everything you have missed you have gained something else. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is the best advice (your parents, composer Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton) have given you?

I would say it’s not particularly career advice but life advice. My mom was all about following your heart and instinct. As I have gotten older, I have connected more with my instinct, which is good. And my dad always said to make decisions based on love, not fear. It’s so good. Why am I making this decision? Is it because I’m afraid I’m not going to get a job again? Well that’s fear. Or I love this thing so much I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it. That’s still a huge thing that guides me in my life.

Now that you have done all these different roles, the acting, the writing, the producing, what do you like doing the most?

They all satisfy such different parts. I think writing is so satisfying at the end; you have this thing you’ve written in your hands. It’s a thing you can show other people. It’s been so fulfilling when I get a compliment on my writing more so than a compliment for my acting.

I also love being on Parks and Recreation and making each other laugh. It’s a lot of fun and it’s less active. Writing is very work intensive. With acting I forget I’m working. That doesn’t happen with writing.

The industry is really competitive. How do you deal with that and keep your mind at ease?

[...] I don’t like the idea that I have to see myself physically in the way that other people see me and make decisions about my life and how I looked based on what other people think of me.

Writing is a little less competitive because you’re creating original material. Sometimes there are plots that are like mine, but it’s really hard to write a movie. Hollywood respects that. And if you write a script they like, they respect you a lot more than actors. It lasts longer and you will get better as you get older. It’s not the same with acting. You have your moment and then your moment is kind of over, or you make a different moment. But you have to work really hard to make that happen.

It's interesting the observation she makes about the differences between acting and writing. Essentially I find them very similar in that both require getting inside another person's head, and dreaming up an entire world. But in practice they require such different facilities. Writing is very intensive, and draining, which is precisely why I love it, whereas as an actor sometimes you can wonder what exactly you just created, other than good feelings and a fleeting sense of communion. This is not to say that acting has any less value, or is any less exhausting. But its imprint can be harder to grasp.

I also love what she says about her dad's advice. How easy is it to fall into the trap of saying yes because of fear instead of love? It's something I have to remind myself of every day.

What advice would you give to people just starting out in their careers?

You have to have a massively specific vision of where you want to be in five years time, the people and places you want to work for. So many people vaguely go, “I want to be a writer” and you need to specifically know what magazine and what page you want to be on and what kind of people you would want to be compared to. You have to have that specific vision and wake up every day saying, “Is this taking me closer to the dream?” Do the thing that every time you ask that question the answer is: Yes.

Your 20s and teens are a time for drifting around, but all good films are about people with very specific quests. The key to life is trying to find something you would do for free anyway and get paid for it.

Caitlin Moran, in an interview with Forbes magazine

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

- Leonardo da Vinci

poet: n. 1. A person who writes poems. 2. A person possessing special powers of imagination or expression.

nuque: n. back of the neck.

She wore a figured lawn, cut a little low in the back, that exposed a round, soft nuque with a few little clinging circlets of soft, brown hair.
-- Kate Chopin, "A Night in Acadie," The Complete Works of Kate Chopin

If he had been a Frenchman he would have seized her in his arms and told her passionately that he adored her; he would have pressed his lips on her nuque.
-- William Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

bibelot: n. small object of beauty, curiousity or rarity.

viridescent: adj. greenish or becoming green.

rutilant: adj. glowing or glittering with red or golden light.

1. Start by taking notes.

You must begin by making notes. You may have to make notes for years…. When you think of something, when you recall something, put it where it belongs. Put it down when you think of it. You may never recapture it quite as vividly the second time.

2. Make a detailed outline of your story

Invent a system Zolaesque…but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down an outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.