For the beginning of a busy week:
"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."
"The world is covered all over with people but geniuses are very few. Interesting if true and it is true."
"And so what is it that makes you a genius. Well yes what is it."
Here is the author who said, "work is something I cannot do," busy in her tomato patch of her house in the country that was a country house. It's a good reminder to look for the humor and self-irony in Stein's writing, to read her with awe, if you like, and with a big grain of salt.
Russian-Jewish like my partner Kim Chernin! She taught me some 20 years ago that writing discipline means not just starting but being able to stop in time. Hardest lesson to learn as I get obsessed and "bulimic" with writing. But she is/ was right, for a whole number of reasons...
You are so right (US Jewish of Russian background). I don't know how to stop doing, but what I have learned ala Stein is that I must leave time to be. That it's okay and very often a time of gestation for whatever project is percolating.
Yes, and coming from someone from a German-Jewish background it's outright shocking. I am like you. (I am not a genius.) When I lived in Paris, my Jewish friends gave me the nickname "Arbeit". Says it all. :)
Russian-Jewish like my partner Kim Chernin! She taught me some 20 years ago that writing discipline means not just starting but being able to stop in time. Hardest lesson to learn as I get obsessed and "bulimic" with writing. But she is/ was right, for a whole number of reasons...
You are so right (US Jewish of Russian background). I don't know how to stop doing, but what I have learned ala Stein is that I must leave time to be. That it's okay and very often a time of gestation for whatever project is percolating.
Yes, and coming from someone from a German-Jewish background it's outright shocking. I am like you. (I am not a genius.) When I lived in Paris, my Jewish friends gave me the nickname "Arbeit". Says it all. :)