Foucault on being an author.

from The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Penguin, 1984.

p. 119

"I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear ...


All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. 

We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? 

Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? 

And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What does it matter who is speaking?"

https://monoskop.org/images/f/f6/Rabinow_Paul_ed_The_Foucault_Reader_1984.pdf

Seneca

Referring to the philosopher Seneca's use of hyperbole, Alain de Botton in The Consolations of Philosophy states:

"If most philosophers feel no need to write like this, it is because they trust that, so long as an argument is logical, the style in which it is presented to the reader will not determine its effectivenesss. 

Seneca believed in a different picture of the mind.

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind's weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. 

We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget."

http://www.alaindebotton.com/ 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/seneca/ 

Sister Wendy Beckett

"... if  I were quiet with my conscience I would never write. 

Perhaps because I am slothful I find it so difficult, you have to pull out from your heart these things you didn't even know you thought. 

So it's work for me, but of course its contemplative work. You can't find any work which isn't potentially prayer."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pJsyXM0uVI

Van Gogh

"Everyone remembers that Van Gogh cut off his ear. Few know that he said: 'The cart one draws must be useful to people whom one does not know'; and that he dedicated his life to trying to make this true."

from John Berger 'Permanent Red' 1960 

http://www.formerwest.org/DocumentsConstellationsProspects/Contributions/FromPermanentRedtoIntoCosmos 

Cart with Black Ox - Vincent Van Gogh