TRYING NEW THINGS

Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.
Virgil Thomson

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE

So many great quotes yesterday. Thank you! And keep them coming ... we need to give that judging panel a proper challenge. If I say that they are giving up a regular bridge game for this task, you will be able to understand just how seriously we are taking this competition!

And, as an extra, I have asked some of the people I find continuously inspiring for their own favourite quotes. First up, is Danielle LaPorte, who is ..



(That postcard above is from her own line of stationery, by the way. I have it on my wall and it always makes me smile. You can find out more here)



As well as her website, and her national television slot, and her consulting work, Danielle is currently working on a book aimed at jolting entrepreneurs up to the next level. I can't wait for this because I've experienced one of her firestarting sessions myself and it was electric. SO many good ideas, and she made me think about even my writing in a whole new way because what are writers if not entrepreneurs?

Here's Danielle's favourite quote about love. And this is what she says about it: "the simplicity and grandness of this always break my heart a little":

Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
- Walt Whitman

Beautiful.

You can leave your quote for entry to the competition either at the bottom of this post, or the previous one, or email me at sarahsalway @ googlemail.com.

IT'S COMPETITION TIME!!!!

So, as mentioned in the last post, my third novel GETTING THE PICTURE comes out at the end of this month.

HURRAH!

It's the story - in mostly letter form - of love, life and sex in an old people's home. The genesis of it began when an elderly woman turned to me at a poetry reading and said she hoped she would never get too old to cry over love.

I suddenly realised that I did too, but more importantly that I had only really thought of writing about love in youthful terms before. And once I started thinking, I realised how limited that approach was.

Publishers Weekly have said this about it:

'Salway (Tell Me Everything) refutes the adage about old dogs and new tricks in this breezy epistolary novel set in a British retirement home. Not that the residents of Pilgrim House don't know plenty of old tricks already: Salway's appreciation of her characters is refreshingly nonpatronizing—her oldsters have rich and naughty pasts, but live in the present, very much alive and eager to gossip, conspire, and seduce... relationships and characters evolve nicely in this lighthearted novel about family and lovers and the not-so-lighthearted secrets that separate them.

Anyway, now I'm offering you the chance to win one of my very first copies - signed and dated. All you have to do is to send me - either by email (sarahsalway - at - googlemail.com) or in the comments box - your favourite quote about love and old age. It can be old, new, or you can even have made it up yourself.

Here's one of mine: Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I'm compiling a panel of over-eighty year olds to judge this, and they are fierce so no quarreling with them please. As we all know, and as GETTING THE PICTURE begins with: Old ladies must never be crossed: in their hands lie the reputations of the young ones. (Pierre Ambroise Laclos)

My panel will pick their favourite, and the bonus is I'll put up all the quotes on the blog so we get to have beautiful words too.

And thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I asked Alain de Botton for his recently and this is what he came up with ...

Some people would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing La Rochefoucauld

So what's yours?

Entries should be in by 26th March, please. Winners announced on 6th April. If two people choose the same quote, the one who sends it in first, gets to enter - but I'll let the second one know. You can enter as many quotes as you like!

PATTI SMITH'S DREAM OF LIFE

Three quotes, as if I need any more reasons to love Patti Smith:

An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.

I think I'm constantly in a state of adjustment.

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.

I've watched the documentary, Dream of Life three times already this year. THREE TIMES! It's one of the best films I've seen about the creative process, plus there's something mesmeric about the way Patti Smith narrates it. Each time I've also got something else out of it. How she says that small towns might be comfortable but sometimes we have to be destroyed in order to survive; the way she says we need music in order to contain the chaos of the sounds we hear every day; the joy she deliberately finds in life, the integrity she brings to a creative life. I have felt so inspired every time.



There's a trailer for the film here and the website is here.

Words on Writing

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977