“I’m really tired of irony. I’m tired
of sarcasm. I’m tired of interacting with my friends, where we make fun
of each other to show each other that we love each other. I’m totally
scarred by that. I’m tired of it and I don’t want to do it. I really
just want to make music that’s really honest and is almost
embarrassingly sincere.”
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear,
since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were
mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the
structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as
definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning
of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles
now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words
matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you
mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates
whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that
ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the
words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture Nota bene:
It tells you. You don’t tell it.”
-Joan Didion, from Why I Write