When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
Interpretation
Writing must remain connected to the beauty and reality of the world around us.
Garrison Keillor emphasizes that effective writing stems from an authentic connection to the world, urging writers to engage with the beauty of their surroundings and the details of everyday life, including the nuances of people's language and experiences. When writing becomes detached from the real world, it loses its essence and purpose.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to inspire students to observe their surroundings more closely.
Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.
When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
You've only got 12 notes and however you mix them up is your thing.
The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.
How do you project a character if you don't have a sense of where she is from? I've always just gotten on a plane to go to the area to get a sense of what it is like, to smell it, feel the earth, hear people talk, go to the marketplaces.
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
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