The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “WALTER BENJAMIN”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves
A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation… Never to get lost is not to live.”

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Schopenhauer on Style
Schopenhauer on Style

“Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.”

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Anne Lamott on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity
Anne Lamott on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.”

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Eudora Welty on the Poetics of Place and Writing as an Explorer’s Map of the Unknown
Eudora Welty on the Poetics of Place and Writing as an Explorer’s Map of the Unknown

“No art ever came out of not risking your neck.”

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The Art of “Creative Sleep”: Stephen King on Writing and Wakeful Dreaming
The Art of “Creative Sleep”: Stephen King on Writing and Wakeful Dreaming

“In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.”

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Ray Bradbury on Failure, Why We Hate Work, and the Importance of Love in Creative Endeavors
Ray Bradbury on Failure, Why We Hate Work, and the Importance of Love in Creative Endeavors

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

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Vladimir Nabokov on Writing, Reading, and the Three Qualities a Great Storyteller Must Have
Vladimir Nabokov on Writing, Reading, and the Three Qualities a Great Storyteller Must Have

“Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.”

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How to Be a Writer: Hemingway’s Advice to Aspiring Authors
How to Be a Writer: Hemingway’s Advice to Aspiring Authors

“As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.”

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Ray Bradbury on How List-Making Can Boost Your Creativity
Ray Bradbury on How List-Making Can Boost Your Creativity

How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.

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Nobel Laureate Alice Munro on the Secret of a Great Story
Nobel Laureate Alice Munro on the Secret of a Great Story

“A story … has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”

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