Stephen Spender (Sir Stephen Harold Spender) Quotes
A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.
Quotes to Explore
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Nuclear power plants must be prepared to withstand everything from earthquakes to tsunamis, from fires to floods to acts of terrorism.
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Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
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I'm not a writer; I'm an actor. My job is to take whatever character I'm given and - especially because I have the responsibility of being a black actress, and I know young black girls are looking up, and everyone's looking to what's on television - to just try to give whatever character I'm playing as three-dimensional a portrayal as I can.
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Your mind is what makes everything else work.
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I have never thought of a full-fledged career in Bollywood because boxing has never left my mind. But you never know.
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Dancing has always been a passion of mine.
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The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
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One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.
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I just like a good story. I want the story to be good, and I want the character to be different than the last one I played. That's not always possible, but that's what I want.
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I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.
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The reason I dislike talking about the creative process is that I do have a creative process that is a winner and it's a sure thing.
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A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.
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Just as it got easier to use email, it will be easier to use Bitcoin as people invest in it and become more familiar with it.
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When you go on an audition it's very frightening.
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You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.
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Youth is really in your attitude, not in what you look like.
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I want to go against the best fighters. That's why I'm always calling out Georges St-Pierre. I don't have anything against Georges St-Pierre. I think he's a great fighter.
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In the days of Caesar, kings had fools and jesters. Now network presidents have anchormen.
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The nurses were all angels in my eyes.
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I didn't really fit well with what was going on in Nashville at the time. I was too loud, I was too bluesy, I was too "a lot of things.
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The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece.
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It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory.
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You know what we say in the Hamptons: If you have to come out on a Friday afternoon or go back on a Sunday night, you're not rich enough to have a house there. So, you have to be able to come and go when you feel like it in the Hamptons.
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A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.
