“As an actor, there’s a bit of you that’s decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there’s a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.”
~ Ralph Fiennes, b. 22 December 1962
pinterest.com/pin/39406565463331764/
Archive | Famous birthday quotes RSS feed for this section
Ralph Fiennes (b. December 22): “As an actor, there’s a bit of you that wants to be looked at…”
22 DecAndrew Carnegie (b. November 25): “I resolved to stop accumulating…”
25 Nov
“I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.”
~ Andrew Carnegie, b. 25 November 1835
pinterest.com/pin/39406565463188033/
Roland Barthes (b. November 12): “Language is a skin” & other obsessions
12 Nov
pinterest.com/pin/39406565465139910/
Roland Barthes (born 12 November 1915, died 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist and critic who influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.
Quotes on language:
- Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
- I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
- Take the gesture, the action of writing. I have an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments. I often switch from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it. I try out new ones. I have far too many pens – I don’t know what to do with all of them! And yet, as soon as I see a new one, I start craving it. I cannot keep myself from buying them.
Neil Young (b. November 12): “I have no other talent…”
12 Nov
“I have no other talent and would be totally out of work if I did anything else.”
~ Neil Young, b. 12 November 1945
pinterest.com/pin/39406565461032388/
Fyodor Dostoevsky (b. November 11): “Pain and suffering are inevitable.”
11 Nov
pinterest.com/pin/39406565465132761/
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881)
Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. His works include the erotic Crime and Spanking (1866), mental health study The Idiot (1869), and romantic sitcom The Brothers Drinkasmirnoff (1880). He wrote 11 novels, three novellas, and 17 short novels.
Demi Moore (b. November 11): “I don’t like to take my clothes off.”
11 Nov
“I don’t like to take my clothes off.”
~ Demi Moore, b. 11 November 1962
pinterest.com/pin/39406565461024956/
Neil Gaiman (b. November 10): “You get ideas from being bored” & other quotes on writing
10 Nov
pinterest.com/pin/39406565465126680/
Neil Gaiman, born 10 November 1960, is an English author who writes short stories, novels, comic books, graphic novels and films. His novels include Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
Quotes on writing
- Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
- Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
- You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.
- Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
- Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.
Richard Burton (b. November 10): “An actor is something less than a man…”
10 Nov
“An actor is something less than a man, an actress something more than a woman.”
~ Richard Burton, b. 10 November 1925
pinterest.com/pin/39406565461021523/
Yiyun Li (b. November 4): “One should be able to imagine being somebody else”
4 Nov
pinterest.com/pin/39406565465091654/
Yiyun Li, born 4 November 1972, is a Chinese American writer whose works include the short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and the novel The Vagrants.
Quotes on writing:
- I think I’m just writing about human nature and it just so happens that my characters are Chinese.
- To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
- What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.
- Oftentimes if a story didn’t work, I would rescue one character or two characters—or one paragraph—from the story and start all over. Which actually was very efficient for me, I think. You can spend so much time revising.
- When I first started writing, I thought a lot about the shape of the stories—do you have a triangle or a rectangle, or do you have a mirror image? Is one character a mirror image of the other? What variation did you do with the characters to make that interesting?
- I wish people would ask me about the importance of the imagination. I really believe that one should be able to imagine being somebody else. This is important for writers, but it’s also important for readers, and for all human beings to be able to imagine being somebody else.
Taiye Selasi (b. November 2): “I write essays to clear my mind, fiction to open my heart.”
2 Nov
pinterest.com/pin/39406565465078969/
Taiye Selasi, born 2 November 1979, is an English writer born to Nigerian and Ghanaian parents. She has published three collections of short stories and the novel, Ghana Must Go.
Quotes on writing:
- I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
- As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.
- The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.
- As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.
- I’ve written fiction for as long as I can remember; it’s always been my preferred form of play.
- I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.
- That’s what makes writer’s block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That’s beyond frightening.
- 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.
- I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are inaccurate, but that they’re incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn’t that it’s inaccurate, it’s that it’s incomplete.
Follow Alan on :
Sextile 