“Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers I’d be a politician.”
quotations
on reading books by Ezra Pound
“No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”
on writing by John Updike
“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think of books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”
on writing by Erica Jong
“Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It’s really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.”
Ernest Hemingway on writing
“A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found out what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”
Mark Twain on reading
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald on writing
“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves–that’s the truth. We have two or three moving experiences in our lives–experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.”
from Reflections on Gandhi by George Orwell
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individual’s.”
from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
“And again he thought the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can only make one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.
History is similar to individual lives in this respect…..
….History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”
translated by Michael Henry Heim
from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach.
Leonard Durso 