Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
Interpretation
Repetition in music can be a meditative process that reflects our own thought patterns.
Eleanor Catton's quote expresses the deep connection between music and the creative process, highlighting how the repetitive nature of listening to songs can evoke a meditative state. This mirroring effect emphasizes the importance of revisiting ideas and phrases in both music and writing, suggesting that creativity often involves a cycle of reflection and refinement.
In practice
During a workshop on songwriting, you might say this quote to illustrate the importance of repeatedly refining lyrics.
My sense of injustice about our family's 'weirdness' in not owning a car was amplified by the fact that we did not own a television, either - my parents were unapologetic about this and told me very cheerfully that I would thank them for it when I was older, which was quite true.
For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.
Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.
The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.
It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.
I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.
The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.
I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.
I think to be a writer, you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.
I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.
If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
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