Lit

The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filing pages. The question in every story is the same: is this the right story to seize what lies silent in my depths, that living thing which if captured, spreads through all the pages and gives them life?

To read is not a virtue; but to read well is an art, and an art that only the born reader can acquire.

If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then….you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.

Now that that organism has, for good or ill, its own self-sufficient equilibrium, why should I entrust myself to the media? Why continue to mix its breath with mine? I have a well-founded fear that the media, which, because of its current nature, that is, lacking a true vocation for "public interest," would be inclined, carelessly, to restore a private quality to an object that originated precisely to give a less circumscribed meaning to individual experience.

The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

Anybody with a normal IQ can manage that. But saying anybody can be a writer is kind of like saying anybody can compose a sonata. Oh, forget it! In any art, there is an initial gift that had to be there. I don’t know how big it has to be, but it’s got to be there.

Matt Caprioli

Matt Caprioli

Lit