Reality

I have to agree with Groucho Marx on this subject:

“I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”

Not to mention my favorite writer Vladimir Nabokov who said “reality” was

“one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.”

Ray Bradbury has it figured out:

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

A little cuckoo

From a Weekly Reader interview, Stephen King nails it. He’s asked whether you have to be “a little cuckoo” to be a successful writer.

Yeah, you do have to be a little nuts to be a writer at all because you have to imagine worlds that aren’t there. OK, you’re hearing voices, you’re making believe, you’re doing all of the things that we’re told as children not to do. Or we’re told to distinguish between reality and those things. As children, grownups put up with it, don’t they? “You have an invisible friend, oh that’s very nice, you’ll outgrow that.” Writers don’t outgrow it. You’ll look at writers… this is true of a lot of different kinds of artists, but it’s very true of writers… if you look at their faces, they have young faces, they have child faces a lot of the times, especially around the eyes. And it’s because you spend your life making believe. And that’s an interesting little quirk of our society—that we set aside part of American society, and we call that the play yard, OK? And all these kids who read my Weekly Reader from grades 6 to 10—they know about the play yard, some of them still go there and some of them go to gym or whatever it is that they go to… but for people like me, we still get to go to the playground. We talked about my schedule, from 8 to 12 I go to the play yard. I sit here and I get to make believe. That’s what I do and they pay me to do it!