writing |

FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY EIGHT

James Baldwin in the Paris Review.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
…
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

The stories we tell ourselves about who we are often end up shaping who we become. I really liked this short piece, both because it makes that truth explicit, and because it reminds us that we can choose to be authors rather than subjects.