Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
Love is the true condition of human life.
Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.
No matter how intelligent a man is, he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see.
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
If you’re a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don’t censor, don’t control. Listen, and write.
What’s needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people’s voices.
What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up.
Fiction – and poetry and drama – cleanse the doors of perception.
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
No society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
Success is somebody else’s failure.
It is useless work that darkens the heart.