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"To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author's vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as "great" or "classic." Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared "good for them" that they "ought to like," at which point the students' nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It's like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire."
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Exlpore more Art quotes
"Always seek beauty to create a beautiful life."
"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."
"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."
"Make movies my friend " make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul."
"My poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage."
"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."
"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."
"Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ..."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace
"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
"For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going."
"One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."
"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."
"The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."
"But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. . . How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?"
"What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration."
"There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone."
"The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all."
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