Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person wh...
Art glows with faith even in its weakest parts. At every moment, writing is an act of self-confidence – the sheerest, most determined, most stubborn self-belief. You CAN have faith and doubt at the same time; the most insecure writer on the planet ...
Every year when i travel around the world, i wonder if it’ll be diferent, maybe one year won’t come to the show or you’ll be less festival, but what i realized during ARTPOP is that we belong together and some stories have no end. I will follow...
If you drop assumptions, and can anticipate the possibilities, you can master the art of strategy. However, if you can only manipulate probability, you can only create a path to victory. But remember, plans can break down. The future is always a step...
Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain...
Warning: This data storage unit, or "book," has been designed to reprogram the human brain, allowing it to replicate the lost art that was once called reading. It is a simple adjustment and there will be no negative or harmful effects from this proce...
If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place... Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and ...
Sich mit diesem oder jenem zu identifizieren, ist also ein normaler Vorgang. Gefährlich wird es, sobald eine einzige Identität bestimmend wird, sobald man nur noch Muslim ist oder Christ oder Deutscher, Iraner oder meinetwegen Anhänger eines besti...
Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated wa...
This is a lttle prayer dedicated to the separation of church and state. I guess if they are going to force those kids to pray in schools they might as well have a nice prayer like this: Our Father who art in heaven, and to the republic for which it s...
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploi...
When the sun goes down, melting away his caresses into the sky which consonants with the ocean, lively colors are scattered through the deep pale depth during some short sensuous instants. Later, as by art of magic, light is consumed into the infinit...
He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, someth...
Here, in Lorrain's poisoned little jewel of a tale (“The Man Who Made Wax Heads”) the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights,...
writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You...
We may live without poetry, music, and art; We may live without conscience, and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks. He may live without books,—what is knowledge bu...
...in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to lear...
The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it ...Art is inconceivable without risk...
Love me, beloved; Hades and Death Shall vanish away like a frosty breath; These hands, that now are at home in thine, Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine; And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride, In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide,...
Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist eith...
I hated [the commercial art studio] because advertising is telling lies, basically, making crap goods look terrific, and I felt I was so privileged to be an artist anyway, why was I prostituting myself on doing this sort of rubbish? So when I left th...
