All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
Interpretation
Good writing often requires effort and depth, akin to the challenge of swimming underwater.
F. Scott Fitzgerald uses this metaphor to convey that great writing involves deep immersion in thoughts and emotions, often requiring the writer to hold back simpler, surface-level expressions. Just as swimming underwater is a strenuous task that demands focus and stamina, so too does writing well require dedication, skill, and the ability to explore complex themes beneath the surface.
In practice
In a writing workshop, teachers may use this quote to inspire students to dig deeper in their narratives.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
If you talk to any filmmaker, and if you said to them, 'I guarantee you x amount of money per month for the rest of your life, and it's not a big amount of money, but I can also guarantee that you will work continually, you will get to make what you want to make,' any filmmaker on the planet will make that kind of deal. I would have made it.
People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'
For me personally, Elliott Carter was and remains one of the most meaningful composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries because he represents substance. He was the living proof of uncompromising, complex music, which at first seems inaccessible. But it becomes accessible if one digs in and sees the development through.
Every photo, every 'ONCE' in time is also the beginning of a story starting 'once upon a time...' Every photo is the first frame of a movie.
Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present.
The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature⦠the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
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