Sunday, February 11, 2007

constraint is the nurse of invention

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit... the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution."

Igor Stravinsky

"Writers, when they are bound hand and foot by the tyranny of a monarch or of a school of poetry, by the constraints of prosodic laws or of a state religion, often attain a power of concentration from which they would have been dispensed under a system of political liberty or literary anarchy."

Proust

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