Like a Pumpkin Vine Makes Pumpkins

I thought of this phrase in Italo Calvino's If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. ‘She said that...she feels the need to see someone who makes books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins --- that's how she put it...’ That's exactly the kind of writer I most enjoy being. Like Elmore Leonard or Phil Dick or even Updike, a book every year or two. Another pumpkin getting orange in the Fall sun. That's the ticket. Barry's that kind of painter, for that matter, growing them like a pumpkin vine grows pumpkins.”
I love, that, making books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins. Another quote from If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler: “The novel I would most like to read at this moment...should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as of branches and leaves...” The desire to narrate, yes.

-Rudy Rucker

Spaceland Notes