Handicrafts and Sesshu I have almost never judged a work of art by first looking at its signature. This way of assessment holds no interest for me. If what I see is good, it is good with or without a seal. Whether it is a painting or a pot, you must first look at the thing itself. Yanagi Sōetsu, The Beauty of Everyday Things fameseeing
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself. Paul Graham, How to do what you love fame
Spelled with a lowercase letter I used to tease John Tukey that you are famous only when your name was spelled with a lowercase letter such as watt, ampere, volt, fourier (sometimes), and such. Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn fame
Somebody is living on this beach Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then I was lonely. To the castle, a sign must have said. Somebody is living on this beach. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress famelonelinesssolitude
1,000 True Fans An Essay by Kevin Kelly kk.org To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans. A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune. artmakingfame
To the Lighthouse A Novel by Virginia Woolf gutenberg.net.au All the lives to beThe alphabetGone crookedExtinguishedA thing you could ruffle with your breath+5 More solitudemelancholyloneliness
All the lives to be And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves. nature
The alphabet Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. death
Gone crooked He was coming to see himself, and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.
A thing you could ruffle with your breath It was a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.
A coherence in things There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune to change, and shines out…in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby. time
All dark and spreading Beneath it is all dark, it is spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
There, with a dash on the beach How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. life
They would never know She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that. melancholy