After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
Interpretation
As we grow older and our lives become more engaging, the need to create narratives for ourselves lessens.
Gore Vidal suggests that during our formative years, storytelling is a vital tool for understanding and interpreting our experiences. However, as we mature and our lives unfold in more captivating ways, the necessity to fabricate narratives about ourselves wanes, as reality becomes rich and interesting enough to live without embellishment.
In practice
In a motivational speech about growing up.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
If you're an addict, it controls your life and your life becomes uncontrollable. It's boring and painful, filling your system with something that makes you stare at your shoes for six hours.
Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.
Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.
Under the spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands. . . . He earns whate'er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man. . . . Toiling,-rejoicing,-sorrowing, Onward through life he goes; Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night's repose.
So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.
From the time an Aiel boy becomes a man he will not sing anything but battle chants, or their dirge for the slain. I have heard them singing over their dead, and over those they have killed. That song is one to make the stones weep.
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