Stephen Greenblatt (Stephen Jay Greenblatt) Quotes
I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
Quotes to Explore
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Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
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Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
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There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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I love writing songs.
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The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
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Personal relationships are usually my biggest inspirations for writing my songs. The best way for me to write a song is to visualise the story in my head, and I start humming a melody, and before you know it, a song is born.
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I will just generalise it that anything that I find too disgusting is not worth an answer.
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I was always more interested in my books and my writing than going out. It's OK to say I'm a nerd. That's me.
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After the children grew up, I began to focus on my writing. My first books were part of a trilogy... The 'Wind Dance' trilogy.
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Nobody's going to write a book about me, because nobody's going to find anything worth writing a book about.
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I'm a pretty easygoing person, and it bleeds into the music. Even if I'm writing the most personal song, it's not going to come out totally serious; there's always a little tongue in the cheek.
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Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
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Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.
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When I graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.
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One thing I've had to realize in my career is that I can't do it all. Sometimes we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make sure we're writing the next hit. There are other people out there, and that's what they do every day, and they have strengths that I don't have.
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All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
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I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.
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I write out of enthusiasm. Momentum that comes from a new idea. Eagerness to explore. I also write out of fear - fear of losing an idea - fear of feeling stagnant.
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States are looking for low-cost solutions that will enable better communication, while avoiding the danger in which the chain of command breaks down in emergencies. We do not want everyone talking to everyone else all the time.
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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.
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Living on hope is like being hungry all the time.
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I think that's the great thing about zombies, is, you know, going back to even 'Night of the Living Dead,' they've always been a tool for kind of holding up a mirror to us and showing us something about ourselves that we might not otherwise know.
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I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
