On Fair Play

Tove Jansson, Fair Play

- Rejection's not easy. But you reject words, whole pages, long impossible stories, and it feels good once it's done. It's no different rejecting pictures, a picture's right to hang on a wall...We need distance, it's essential...You simply have to feel it...Let them catch their breath and look again because they can't help it. Make them think, make them mad, even...'

- They never asked, "Were you able to work today?" Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they'd gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected - those often long periods when a person can't see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone. -

- I can help it. Don't you understand; there isn't time any more. It's all I do, just observe, observe to distraction, pictures that don't mean shit until I draw them and redraw them. I've had enough for one life, my only life! -

- ...it couldn't go on like this, these short stories that were never finished and just went on and on getting rewritten and discarded and picked up again, all those words that got changed and changed and I can't remember how they were yesterday and what's happened to them today! -

- She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love. -