#writer

If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#awareness #life #life

Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ever threatens violence. We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide bombs. We are very gentle people. All we do is use words to talk about things like the cosmos, the origin of the universe, evolution, the origin of life. What's there to be frightened of? It's just an opinion. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#life

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#writer #life

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice. ↗

— Paul Auster

#loneliness #paper #words #writer #writing

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#passivity #writer #writing #life

We always question the bonafides of the man who tells us unpleasant facts. ↗

— R.K. Narayan

#life

The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life. ↗

— Mario Vargas Llosa

#writers #life

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life. ↗

— Walter de La Mare

#writers #writing #life

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about. ↗

— Sharon Delarose

#dog-lover #dogs #life-with-dogs #living-with-dogs #writer

Books of the sages of the ages reflect upon in stages; like honey their words on the tongue give due savour.” {Source: A Green Desert Father} ↗

— Richard Mc Sweeney

#esoteric #fashion #freedom-of-thought #ireland #irish-poet