The drama's laws the drama's patrons give._x000D_ _x000D_ For we that live to please must please to live.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that artists must cater to the tastes of their audience in order to succeed.
Samuel Johnson's quote reflects the relationship between creators and their audience, suggesting that the rules and expectations set by patrons dictate the form and content of artistic work. Furthermore, it highlights the necessity for artists to meet these expectations in order to sustain their livelihood, thus illustrating the tension between artistic integrity and commercial viability.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of audience feedback in artistic creation.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine... Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.
My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.
Everybody must have a fantasy.
Selling beauty is something I can understand. Even selling false beauty seems perfectly natural; it's a sign of progress.
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