Juan Goytisolo Quotes

I'm inspired by many things, from landscapes to textiles. Art and architecture always influence my design process.

I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.

From Shakespeare to Robi Thakur, everyone has written stories about people and incidents around them. There is no creativity minus reality irrespective of how flowery or abstract you make it.

Art has definitely influenced how I think of design, both as individual items and as a body of work.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

I am very much aware of the visual side of things. I do a lot of photography. I often take Polaroids of things that strike me as visually interesting, just to remember them and perhaps use later.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.

My university degree is in art and, yes, I do a lot of drawing for all my books. I have a big drafting table set up in a spare bedroom and I cover it with maps and house plans and sketches that I use in the books. Also, I truly love architecture, so that plays a big part in all my books.

Composing means you have a beginning, middle and end and a fluidity to what you're doing.

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

Music is an important part of my writing process.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

I'm a visual person - when I write, my input is always visual. I worked in television for several years.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

Writing isn't about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I've always written about other artists, or I write my thoughts down, but I've never written a story.

Photography led me to experiment in graphic work and, actually, painting.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

Photography and painting, all of that fed into my directing eventually.