Edwin Muir Quotes
Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
Quotes to Explore
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Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.
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When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.
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The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.
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There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.
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Characters who don't suffer have no interest to me.
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The film industry is mostly about unidimensional characters.
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Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.
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Some of the biggest movie stars in the world are essentially characters.
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When I was a kid, I used to make up all these characters. I love comedy a lot, and I don't get to do it often. Somewhere in the middle, I shifted into doing drama.
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Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
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Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
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Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.
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Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature.
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When you're in the head of the character, you feel less self-conscious. If I was just being me, I would feel so exposed and be like, 'Why is there a huge camera in my face?' But, when you're believing in the person that you're playing, you feel protected. It's about being true to that person you're playing.
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For me, it's first about the characters. I look for a character who is intriguing and challenging and different from what I've done before.
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So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
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There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.
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For me, 'Mommy' was about developing very humane characters that would be very credible and endearing and work onscreen.
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It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
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I once called a guy into his own office and spun around in his own chair to greet him. That kind of thing may be why I quit, before I got into serious trouble. I would smile and the person would get so upset. But you do a thousand of those things, and it makes you weird.
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I'm not thinking about the next record really yet. I kind of want to do a bunch of stuff with Jonathan Zawada, the guy who did the album art. I'd like to do some crazy art installations and design some weird synthesizers and work with other people and make some fun stuff for a bit. Maybe tap into virtual reality stuff or maybe write another record.
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Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.
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Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too-mentally-impaired to function, cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights - that's suppression by any light.
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Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
