Quote of the Day (Patti Smith, on the Mystery Behind Her Performances)

“It’s a mystery I’ve never solved. What is it that drives me to perform when I can hardly hold my own at a dinner party?”—Singer-songwriter, poet, and memoirist Patti Smith, on becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star, quoted in John Heilpern, “Conversation: Out to Lunch With Patti Smith,” Vanity Fair, November 2015

(The image accompanying this post, of Patti Smith performing at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, was taken by her sister, Kimberly Smith, on Dec. 31, 2007.)

Quote of the Day (Andre Dubus, on Shyness at School)

“Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.”— American short story writer, essayist, novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus (1936-1999), “Under the Lights,” in Broken Vessels (1991)

Quote of the Day (Joe Moran, on Shy Writers)

“Shyness is often seen as just a shrinking away from the crowd, a retreat from social life. But it also involves redirecting our social instincts into other areas, like writing. We write partly because we feel that other kinds of dialogue have failed, and that we need to speak at one remove if we are to speak at all. Writing draws, just as shyness does, on what the French call l’esprit de l’escalier: that conversation we carry on in our heads after the other person has gone.”—Joe Moran, “Do Shy People Make the Best Writers?”, The Daily Beast, March 11, 2017