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Tag: quotes

  • August 10th, 2012 7:58pm

    Men think that acting unjustly is in their power, and therefore that being just is easy. But it is not; to lie with one’s neighbor’s wife, to wound another, to deliver a bribe, is easy and in our power, but to do these things as a certain state of character is neither easy nor in our power.

    — Aristotle (via trevoredwards)

  • August 9th, 2012 8:47pm

    Fiction must contain ideas, which give significance to characters and events. If the ideas are shallow or untrue, the fiction will be correspondingly shallow or untrue. But ideas must be experienced through or with the characters; they must be felt or the fiction will fail also.

    — Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction (via fierycross)

  • August 9th, 2012 2:47am

    It was creative desperation because that’s when a man really begins to think hard, and of course it hearkens me back to the creation of The Hulk, which I told you about, and this woman who lifted a car. If you want to do it, you can lift a buildings. I’m not saying you can, and I’m not saying you can’t get a hernia, but I’m not ruling out that you might possibly, if you find the right niche, you might possibly lift that building. Maybe not far. Maybe an inch above the ground. Maybe it’s not a large building, but you can do it. I’ve seen man do everything. I think Man is the kind of animal that is capable of doing anything, whether it’s good or heinous; whether it’s easy or horribly, horribly difficult.

    —

    Jack Kirby Interview | The Comics Journal

    (via bigredrobot)

  • August 8th, 2012 11:28pm

    I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.

    — Neil Gaiman (via cityyandcolour)

  • August 5th, 2012 2:14am

    Novelist Richard Koster offers a blanket absolution for what writers ten to think of as ‘wasting time’ – that hour or two of muddled glaring at the page before a word will allow itself to be placed there. In in the process of creating fiction we must divorce ourselves from the real world, he points out. And that is hard. The real world is insistent not only in its distractions but in its brute physical presence. To remove ourselves from that sphere and achieve a state in which our mental world is more real requires a disciplined effort of displacement.

    — Janet Burroway – Writing Fiction; A guide to narrative craft