Kingsley William Amis (April 16, 1922 – October 22, 1995) The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the …
Joan Miró On Creativity
Joan Miró (April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983) The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later…For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.
Katherine Hepburn On Satisfaction
Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun. If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.
Adrienne Rich On Poets
Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929–March 27, 2012) I have been a poet of the oppositional imagination, meaning that I don't think my only argument is with myself. My work is for people who want to imagine and claim wider horizons and carry on about them into the night, rather than rehearse the landlocked details of …
George Orwell On Fascism
George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon.
Alice Koller On Writing
Alice Koller The only “doing” that’s the same every day is that most writers go to the same desk and chair that we sat in and worked at yesterday, and that the “working” is with the same computer, and the same pen, or the same kind of pen, each with a different color of ink. …
John Steinbeck On Literature
John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by …
