You’re in a terrible situation either way.

Yan Lianke

 

INTERVIEWER

You talk about the lure of the city, but don’t The Explosion Chronicles and The Family Plot suggest that, as rural villages expand and become wealthier, their inhabitants tend to lose their moral compasses?

YAN LIANKE

I’ve written about all the problems wealth brings, but also about the difficulties of being poor. Humankind lives in an eternal dilemma. You’re in a terrible situation either way.

INTERVIEWER

Could we say that your real subject is power, then? People are powerless when they’re poor, and after gaining power, they use it to oppress others.

YAN

Gaining the power to control others is a terrifying business. I’m currently writing a novel that includes all the revolutionaries who emerged after the Qing dynasty⁠—Sun Yat-Sen, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and so on, along with fictional characters from other people’s work, as well as Lu Xun, Hu Shih, and virtually every other Modernist writer. And the writers who killed themselves during the Cultural Revolution, like Lao She and Fu Lei. Obviously, the novel is unpublishable, but I’m strongly drawn to writing it. If only there were no such heroes and we could all calmly live our lives. In any case, I won’t discuss the plot in this interview. Let’s just say that I’m writing a book that I plan never to publish. I’ll leave it to my son, and maybe he’ll pass it on to his children. Maybe, far in the future, people will read it and know that their ancestors once thought and wrote in this way.

(The Paris Review: Yan Lianke, The Art of Fiction  No. 269)

Watching Iranian films helped me...

Watching Iranian films helped me to picture the sections set in Tehran, and I always like to cook any food that’s mentioned in the books I’m translating; listen to the music; do anything I can to get a feel for a place; though no, I’ve never been to Iran.

(Ruth Martin on Translating The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar; Outlook, June 8, 2026)

I am myself the matter of my book

Michel de Montaigne

 “Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”

— Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580

So, reader, here I am, the subject of my book, and I see no reason why you should spend your free time on so unimportant and pointless a topic.

- Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580

I believe in...

"I see, you don't believe in Science, and you also don't believe that political systems work and you don't believe in God, huh?... so, then, what do you believe in?"

"Sex and Death."

- From Woody Allen's Movie, Sleeper

Marie NDiaye's Quotes

Marie NDiaye

"I know I won’t call out for any of my characters on my deathbed."

INTERVIEWER

But surely you read each novel countless times, going through multiple drafts⁠—you never think about your characters once you’re finished with them? 

NDIAYE

Never. That anecdote about Balzac, that just before his last breath he called for Doctor Bianchon⁠—I find it astonishing. I know I won’t call out for any of my characters on my deathbed. 

In any case, I rarely go back over what I’ve written. There are no drafts. I revise very little. 

 

 

--

 

INTERVIEWER

So how do you write? 

NDIAYE

You mean literally? 

INTERVIEWER

Yes. Do you have a ritual or routine? 

NDIAYE

Well, I sit over there, at the table, or maybe in bed. Or not in bed, but on my bed. I don’t need an office, just my computer. It’s okay if I’m interrupted⁠—if the phone rings, say. It doesn’t bother me to be bothered. When the children were still little, I was interrupted all the time. Mostly, back then, I worked during their school hours, but I maintained a similar kind of discipline even after they left home. My working sessions have always been short, about two hours, so they must be two very productive hours. After that, I feel I can go no further. 

 

 

(From The Paris Review: Marie NDiaye, The Art of Fiction No. 268)

Frederick Wiseman's Quotes

"The edited sequence is a fictional form of the original." 

INTERVIEWER

What happens to those sequences?

WISEMAN

It takes me six months to select and edit those sequences. It’s only when I’ve edited those so-called candidate sequences that I begin to work on structure. I have no idea, in advance, of the film’s structure or what its point of view will be. It evolves from studying the material. Then I try to figure out how they might fit together, to determine what meaning might be attached to the way they’re ordered. In doing that, so as to both edit an individual sequence and to create a structure, I have to think I understand—however delusional that may be—what’s going on in each sequence and, subsequently, in their selected and proposed order. Now you’re wondering what I mean by that.

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

WISEMAN

I have to explain to myself what’s going on within a sequence in order to know whether I want to use it, and then I have to edit it down from its original length to a usable version without changing what I consider my understanding of the event. For example, I have to constantly ask myself the question, Why? Why are the participants saying what they’re saying? What is the significance of their choice of words? Why do they look left rather than right? Why does somebody ask for a cigarette at a certain point in the conversation? Is there any significance to the clothes people are wearing? Unless I think I understand what’s going on in each sequence, I can’t make the choices that will allow me to condense it into a usable form. For example, in At Berkeley (2013), some of the meetings of the chancellor’s cabinet went on for an hour and a half, and in the final film, they’re reduced to nine or ten minutes. Those nine or ten minutes are assembled from the original ninety and edited to appear as if the sequence originally took place the way it’s seen in the final film. The edited sequence is a fictional form of the original. Unless I think I understand the original sequence, I cannot make the choice, one, to use it, two, to reduce it to a usable form, and three, to know where to place it in the structure of the film. Unless I can offer myself an explanation, correct or incorrect, as to why I’m making the choices I’m making, I’m lost. Although I may be lost anyway. Before the film is finished, I have to be able to put into words why I have selected each shot and the meaning I attach to the order of the sequences.

That’s equally true when I start working on the structure. Unless I can explain to myself why sequence 2 follows sequence 1, or how sequence 32 is related to sequence 4, or how the first sequence is related to the last, it’s too random. I have to have a theory. It’s not necessary that anyone else reconstructs that theory—although if someone wants to, I think there are always enough clues—but I have to have a theory. Those choices are the way I express my point of view about the material.

 

INTERVIEWER

Can you give an example from one of your own films?

WISEMAN

For me, when a film works, it works because it proceeds on two levels simultaneously. It proceeds on the literal level—who says what to whom, what people are wearing, the way that people turn, the gestures they make. The abstract level is what is suggested by the literal events. An example would be after the main title of Welfare (1975), when you see people’s pictures being taken and you hear the click of the camera, and you see—I’ve forgotten how many people—let’s say ten or twelve people being photographed. The literal aspect is that applicants for welfare need an ID card to be eligible to receive welfare. The abstract aspect is how the photographs selected for use in that sequence tell something important about the applicants, who are white, black, Asian, and perhaps of mixed race. The film was made in 1973, when a common view was that only black people were on welfare. My choice of applicants plays against that. This is done with no explicit statement in words but requires an inference from the choice of photographs. This is my way of conveying an idea in film with no need for a literal, verbal statement about race or ethnicity. Also, at the same time, the sequence conveys literally that the administration of welfare requires recipients to have ID cards to prevent fraud when public funds are distributed.

 

INTERVIEWER

Even with this line between novelistic and journalistic, you still don’t mind your films being called documentaries?

WISEMAN

Well, I prefer they be called movies. They’re based on real events, but there’s a necessary and obviously fictional aspect to them. The selection of sequences, their reduction to a usable form, the order of sequences, and the structure are all fictional.

 

INTERVIEWER

Why not just use additional cameras? With another camera, another person could shoot those reaction shots as they occur, and in editing, you could sync up the two cameras, for “accurate” reactions.

WISEMAN

I don’t for a variety of reasons. It is too expensive to have a second camera. It is important to keep the crew small. More people draw more attention to the film. And you run the risk of filming each other.

 

(From The Paris Review: The Art of Documentary No. 1)

 

I think the truth is...

 I think the truth is that novelists are not universal legislators of morality, they don’t set out to write about the most important issues; they write about the ones that have actually touched their lives. 

 

-        Edmund White

Yu Hua's Quotes

Ya Hua

"All the movies I watch are pirated."

In the later days of the Cultural Revolution, the library in town reopened, with maybe thirty or forty volumes of what they called revolutionary literature, the sanctioned kind, and I read all of that in one summer. But there were a small number of novels that got passed around my middle school in secret, until they lost their front or back covers. There’d be ten pages missing from the beginning and another ten missing from the end. By the time they reached me, I’d have no idea even what their titles or who their authors were. In my experience, you can live with not knowing how a story begins, but not knowing how it ends? Now that’s torture. I found it so unbearable that I started making them up myself, inventing one ending after another. My classmates would crowd around asking to hear my stories. When I think back to it now, I realize that’s where my writing career began. 

 

--

The writer with whom I was most infatuated, though, was Kawabata. I read a story of his called “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” and I was enamored with him for four years, reading everything I could get my hands on—Thousand Cranes, The Old Capital, Snow Country, which I still think is just the best … Kawabata taught me that it’s detail, not plot, that makes something worth reading—that great works of literature aren’t sequences of events but assemblages of unforgettable details. That’s what readers find moving—the storyline is merely interesting. At twenty-one, I was completely sunk by one of his stories. A woman whose fiancé is at war worries he’s died in battle, visits a house that’s under construction in his neighborhood, and speculates about who will live there when it’s complete. This is classic Kawabata, and it became my ideal—a story without a protagonist, just supporting characters. He showed me that you didn’t have to write in this constricted narrative progression of life unto death, that you could reverse it. 

 

--

 

INTERVIEWER

How was it sharing a room with Mo Yan? Did you show each other your work?

YU

While I was writing Cries in the Drizzle, he was writing The Republic of Wine. We rarely exchanged our works in progress, but we worked side by side, at two desks that faced the same wall. At first, there was just one cabinet in the room to divide our separate spaces, and later we went and stole another, which he had discovered somewhere. When we opened their doors, they divided the room almost completely. But the thing is, when you’re writing longhand, you want to lean back, to look to the right or the left as you’re thinking, and there was a small gap between the two cabinets. Often I’d look over and see he’d be looking at me. It felt wrong. I’d say, “You’re affecting my work.” He’d say, “You’re affecting my work.” In the end he went to some garbage pile and found an old calendar with photos of popular actors. He hung it on a nail—the gap was sealed. 

 

--

INTERVIEWER

Does it bother you that your books have been pirated?

YU

I have no objections. All the movies I watch are pirated—to all the filmmakers out there, my apologies, but the kinds I like don’t screen in our theaters, so it’s the only way I can watch them! Our pirating technologies are incredible, by the way. Cannes Film Festival ends in May, and by August or September we can watch the movies, with translated subtitles. 

 

--

 

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever considered emigrating?

YU

No. I’m too used to life in China, and you can’t find the bustle of Beijing anywhere else. Not to mention that I don’t speak any foreign languages. I remember, back in the nineties, Wang Shuo went to the U.S. for a year. We all thought, Wow, his English must be getting so good, but it turned out he still couldn’t speak it. Zhang Yuan told me he’d been to LA to visit him—they’d gotten coffee on Wang Shuo’s street and managed to sit there all day without hearing a word of English. Everyone was Chinese. If I moved to the U.S., my life would probably be like Wang Shuo’s was that year. If that’s the case, I might as well stay in Beijing. 

 

--

  

Literature is not the only thing in my life. I encourage my students to think this way, too. Recently, I told one of them, “Let’s meet this afternoon to talk about the story you wrote,” and he said, “Professor, I’m going clubbing tonight.” I said, “All right, have fun.”

 

 

(From The Paris Review Interview: The Art of Fiction No. 261)

 

 

 

 

Liberal idealism...

Liberal idealism and liberal idealists are possible only in Russia. Mr. Verkhovensky, like every witty man, needed an audience, and he also had to feel that he fulfilled a supreme duty by spreading ideas through his words.

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(The Possessed)

Interested in just one thing: death.

I have always really been interested in just one thing: death. Nothing else. I became a human being when, at the age of ten, I saw my grandfather dead, whom at that time I probably loved more than anyone else.

It is only since that I have been a poet, an artist, a thinker. The vast difference which divides the living from the dead, the silence of death, made me realise that I had to do something. I began to write poetry. […] For me, the only thing I have to say, however small an object I am able to grasp, is that I am dying. I have nothing but disdain for those writers who also have something else to say: about social problems, the relationship between men and women, the struggle between races, etc., etc. It sickens my stomach to think of their narrow-mindedness. What superficial work they do, poor things, and how proud they are of it.

          Dezso Kosztolanyi

         Hungarian Poet and Writer (1885-1936)

world doesn't need your book

There is no measurement of whether you're the best person to write a book. The world doesn't even need a particular book. You make your book come to life purely because you believe it should exist.

- Mimi Mondal

ఉద్యమం - పాలన

"Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose." 
- జైరామ్ రమేశ్.

ఈ వ్యాఖ్య నేను ఎలాగో మిస్సయ్యాను. పాత వీక్(ఫిబ్రవరి 2, 2014) తిరగేస్తుంటే Point Blankలో కనబడింది. ఇది చెప్పిన సందర్భం ఏమిటో కొంత ఊహించగలిగేదే! అయినా గూగుల్ ఉన్నది ఎందుకు!
ఆమ్ ఆద్మీ ప్రభుత్వాన్ని ఉద్దేశించి ఈ కేంద్ర గ్రామీణాభివృద్ధి శాఖ మంత్రి జనవరిలో చేసిన వ్యాఖ్యానం అది. 
మొత్తం వ్యాఖ్య ఇది: 
"Agitation is all about poetry, governance is all about prose." 
(They have not made the transition from being agitators to administrators.)

ఆయన చెప్పిందాన్నే తిరగేస్తే కవిత్వాన్నీ, వచనాన్నీ ఇలా నిర్వచించుకోవచ్చేమో! 
Poetry is all about Agitation; Prose is all about Governance.

డబ్బుల వ్యసనం

I was lucky. My experience with drugs and alcohol allowed me to recognize my pursuit of wealth as an addiction.
- For the Love of Money By SAM POLK 

మానవజాతి ఘోర తప్పిదం

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it.
- Jared Diamond in The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

అర్థం కాకపోవడంలో అందం

For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.- Carl Sagan in Can We Know the Universe?

అర్థం కావడంలో అందం

When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
-Carl Sagan in Can We Know the Universe?

ఒక ధమ్మపదం

నత్థి రాగసమో అగ్గి నత్థి దోససమో కలి,

నత్థి ఖన్ధాదిసా దుక్ఖా నత్థి సన్తిపరం సుఖం.

రాగం (attachment)తో సమానమైన అగ్ని లేదు. ద్వేషంతో సమానమైన పాపం లేదు. స్కంధాలతో సమానమైన దుఃఖం లేదు. శాంతిని మించిన సుఖం లేదు.

(రూపం, వేదన, సంజ్ఞ, సంస్కారం, విజ్ఞానం అనేవి ఐదు స్కంధాలు. వీటి సముదాయమే జీవుడు. )

పుస్తకం: ధమ్మపదం (బుద్ధుడి బోధనల సారాన్ని తెలిపే శ్లోకాలు) 

అనువాదం: పుల్లెల శ్రీరామచంద్రుడు

ఇదీ బ్యాంకింగ్ అంటే!

The IBBC is a bank. Their objective is not to control the conflict, it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value, is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry, to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt.

Louis Salinger పాత్రధారి Clive Owen, Eleanor Whitman  పాత్రధారి Naomi Watts ప్రశ్నించినప్పుడు... బ్యాంకింగ్ అసలు స్వభావం ఏమిటో Umberto Calvini పాత్రధారి Luca Barbareschi పై విధంగా చెబుతాడు.

The International
2009
Tom Tykwer

అమెరికా అమెరికాయే!

With Anti Americanism rampant all over the world, People love to hate this Cowboy.

- Jack Conrad పాత్రధారి Stone Cold గురించి,
 Ian Breckel పాత్రధారి Robert Mammone.

The Condemned
2007
Scott Wiper

శేఖర్ ఇలా అన్నారు

నేను సాధారణంగా బ్లాగులు ఎలా చదువుతానంటే,
నాదాంట్లో ఎవరో కామెంటు రాస్తారు, లేదంటే మిత్రులుగా చేరుతారు. వీళ్లెవరు?
నా మీద ఆసక్తి చూపించిన వీళ్లమీద ఇక నాకు ఆసక్తి మొదలవుతుంది.
అలా, వాళ్ల (ఉంటే) బ్లాగు, అందులో కామెంట్లు రాసినవాళ్లు, వాళ్లు మిత్రులుగా ఉన్న ఇతర బ్లాగులు... ఇలా పోతూ పోతూ ఎక్కడికో తేలుతాను. అలా నాకు కొన్ని చాలా చక్కటి బ్లాగులు పరిచయమయ్యాయి.
ఇప్పుడు ఇది ఎందుకు చెబుతున్నానంటే... మొన్న ఇలా ఒక తోక వెంబడి, ఆ తోకతో మరో తోకలోకి ఇలా పోతూ పోతూ పోతే... ఒకచోట శేఖర్ కపూర్ బ్లాగు తగిలింది. ఆయన తన బ్లాగుకు రాసుకున్న పరిచయం వాక్యాలు అద్భుతంగా తోచాయి. వాటిని దిగువన ఇస్తున్నాను.
I exist because you imagine I do.

ఈ తర్వాతిది ఇంకా బాగుందనిపించింది.

Neither prejudiced by the past, nor in fear of the future.
The moment, only the moment.