Apparently it was Gilles Deleuze’s birthday yesterday, so big thanks for BIG OTHER coughing up a selection of quotes by the man himself, among which this one was the one that I really needed to read today:

Creation takes place in bottlenecks…A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities…it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through. You have to work on the wall, because without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have the line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric…You have to open up words, break things open, to free earth’s vectors.

As one can probably guess, I’m very much in that wall-head-smashing place with a particular project right now, a proper creative bottleneck… and it’s nice to have some words of encouragement, even if they’re from a deceased and notoriously gnomic philosopher.

(I also got some rather gentler wisdom from Saint Ursula while reading before bed last night, but I will save talking about that until the bottleneck project is done, as it relates more directly to the concrete writerly practice than ol’ Gilles’s abstract advice above, and I still seem to have a superstition around talking publicly about ongoing projects in such concrete terms. Pfft — artists, amirite?)