I share this quotation in the hope that it will inspire you as it has me. For quite some time, I had only heard it in paraphrased form. I’ve found it now in its original form, in an interview in The Paris Review — Katherine Anne Porter: The Art of Fiction #29.

“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.”