53 quotes found
“True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it ex...”
“All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world two snake pits.”
“So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.”
“We human beings glimpse lofty ideals, catch ourselves betraying them, and sink to suicidal despair--despair from which only the love of our friends can save us, since friends see in us those nobler...”
“My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.”
“The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.”
“Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something o...”
“What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?”
“He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gestu...”
“The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there ...”
“When a writer first begins to write, he or she feels the samefirst thrill of achievement that the young gambler or oboeplayer feels: winning a little, losing some, the gambler sees theglorious poss...”
“I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. it's all a hero asks for.”
“Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.”
“...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.”
“Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.”
“It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, and the circle occupied by gods and men grew smalle...”
“It's not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.”
“Go ahead, scoff, he said, petulant. Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, u...”
“God be kind to all good Samaritans and also bad ones. For such is the kingdom of heaven.”
“We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continu...”
