My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the joy and value of creativity and simplicity in art.
In this quote, Cormac McCarthy expresses a profound appreciation for the act of creation, suggesting that a perfect day involves the tranquility and potential of simply having blank paper at one's disposal. He equates this serene creative space to 'heaven' and 'gold', indicating that true fulfillment comes from the ability to express oneself artistically rather than from external distractions or material pursuits.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of creativity in education.
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
You know, I would say that songwriting is something about the expression of the heart, the intellect and the soul.
A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.
I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.
I hate this life of the fashionable world, always ordered, measured, ruled, like our music-paper. What I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own resources, and accountable only to myself.
Create form out of the nature of the task with the means of our time. This is our work.
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'
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