" In a way...it's a struggle to be human. I mean, if you really look at it, we wake up every morning to an alien environment. Certainly not the environment man was created in. Its a busy, throbbing, hustling, buzzing, spinning, crazy, alien environment. And the struggle for me, within that, is to try and be human, to try and do human things, to try and remember what we were born with. So to me, it is very much a struggle to be human, not so much a human struggle to do something else, but a struggle just to feel...human."
~Lee Stringer
"More and more these days i find that people want to boil things down to something simple, something you can grab in a second. I also see that today people are very result oriented. We won't do anything just because it's the right thing to do, or for the sake of art, or for the sake of anything unless we can prove that down the road x y, or z is going to happen. I guess in that kind of environment it is difficult for what we call literature to exist because a book is not all that practical a thing in the short term. It's probably infinitely practical in the long term. But you're not going to pick my novel off the shelf and learn how to scramble eggs tomorrow. So in that context, writing is a struggle to preserve our right to be not so practical..."
~Lee again, i love this bit.
"You know, man tries to be a sociologist all the time, but the truth is, you know, if you look around, we really suck at it. So i don't know if there is anything to be done about it - say for example, homelessness. What? Eliminate it? Move these people ? Get them out of your faces? Feed everybody?
I dont know what's to be done about it, except to find what your relationship is to it. I think that's the only work.
Not to eliminate what offends our sense of what should be, or who we are. Just to find a relationship to it. Just, when you pass somebody on the street: 'what is your relationship to that person?
I mean, how as human beings do we relate to one another? Anything beyond that is bullshit."
~surreal, Lee!
" People will continue to write novels, or maybe short stories, because they discover that they are treating their own neuroses. And i have said, about the practice of arts, be it painting, music, dance, literature, or whatever - is not a way to make money, or become famous. It's a way to make your soul grow. So you should do it anyway. "
~lee is god.
"When it comes to justice, the kind that gets you locked up is different from the kind you find inside. Personally, i would like to see all judges and district attorneys made to do time. Not for the crimes they commit from the bench. For they commit those out of ignorance. Which is precisely why, time in prison should be a part of their qualifications. So they might come to know what they dont know they dont know. Let them sit faceless and despised in the holding cells, let them be run through the wringer of their process until the wind has been wrung out of their self-righteousness. And let them stumble on the wisdom every two-bit con knows instinctively, that real justice is always poetic.
~Kurt Vonnegut.
Finally...Lee Stringer is just really divine.
"You want tips on writing, sure...well, you know, i had a lot of fun bumping into...its a joy of discovery for me. I kind of would not like to know what i am doing. I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how i am going to fill up those pages, and then, convinced that i am not going to figure it out, bingo! something happens. It's like shaking hands with God."
it is...it is...
~amen...
(the above extracts, from "Like Shaking Hands with God - a Conversation about writing, between Kurt Vonnegut, and Lee Stringer" - more coming up)
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