I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of language and the artistry involved in crafting impactful prose.
Dennis Lehane highlights the vital role that language plays in communication and expression. He advocates for striving to elevate one's writing to its utmost potential, suggesting that well-crafted prose can resonate like music, creating a profound connection with readers through its beauty and rhythm.
In practice
A writer can use this quote to inspire students in a creative writing class.
Life isn't happily ever after... It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves that burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything - because that's what growing older is.
Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.
The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.
It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.
You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.
You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.
I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.
In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.
Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.
You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
The best book, like the best speech, will do it all - make us laugh, think, cry and cheer - preferably in that order.
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