Lyric ideas are as illusive as fireflies. They are spirits flitting between the trees. The moment you give them your attention, they are gone. But still you write, because over the years you have learned—midst the nonsensical hieroglyphics you compulsively scrawl in your notebooks, the dumb single lines that stare contemptuously back at you, the song titles that excite you then lose their magic the next time you look at them, the half-baked and derivative ideas, the stolen lines, the Freudian doodles, the desperate over-egged metaphors and lunatic, pencil-snapping, last-ditch attempts at something, my God, anything—you have learned to hold fast and trust. You have learned from hard-won experience that within this pile of words something mysterious is going on, something beyond the reaches of your understanding, something that simply takes its own sweet time and of which you are a tiny part—you are the guy who turns up to hold the pencil—and that suddenly, without warning, you find you have taken one line of no consequence and attached it to another line of no consequence and a kind of reverberation begins between the two lines, a throbbing—or as I like to call it, a ‘shimmering’—it is something you can actually see! And as the two combined lines pulsate, they begin to collect significance impossibly, and at a rapid rate, to load up with meaning, even to call down a melody, and your heart begins to beat as if for the first time in God knows how long, and you come alive, you become an actual person, a functional, competent human being deserving of their place on this earth, because you know, suddenly, more than anything, that you are on to something and this shimmering convergence of words is setting off on its journey to change the world.

∆ Nick Cave, from The Red Hand Files (no. 3, October 2018)

When women writers of my generation speak in awed tones of Didion’s “style,” I don’t think it’s the shift dresses or the sunglasses, the cigarettes or commas or even the em dashes that we revere, even though all those things were fabulous. It was the authority. The authority of tone. There is much in Didion one might disagree with personally, politically, aesthetically. I will never love the Doors. But I remain grateful for the day I picked up “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. It must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do—but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them. You wanted to believe it. You needed proof. And not Victorian proof. Didion—like her contemporary Toni Morrison—became Exhibit A. Uniquely, she could be kept upon your person, like a flick knife, stuffed in a back pocket, the books being so slim and portable. She gave you confidence. Shored you up.

∆ Zadie Smith on Joan Didion