Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
Michael OndaatjeRead
It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.
Interpretation
Writing from another's perspective enhances your understanding and empathy.
This quote emphasizes the power of writing as a means of exploring different perspectives and experiences. When an author adopts a point of view that is not their own, it can lead to a deeper understanding of diverse lives and feelings, ultimately broadening their own perception and empathy towards others.
In practice
In a creative writing workshop, to encourage students to explore different narratives.
Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
My goal is for 'Heavy Rain' to leave an imprint in you and change a little bit of who you are and how you see things. Maybe the key characters and key moments will leave a trace in you. If you don't have this ambition as a video-game creator, then maybe you should do something else, because this is what creation and art is about.
I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.
I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts.
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