The greedy search for money or success will almost always lead men into unhappiness. Why? Because that kind of life makes them depend upon things outside themselves.
Andre MauroisRead
Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that every story involves a disillusionment or loss of innocence.
Andre Maurois emphasizes the universal theme in literature where characters often experience a loss of illusion, leading to personal growth or transformation. This concept reflects the depth and complexity of human experiences, showing that through the journey of life and storytelling, individuals come to terms with reality, moving from naive expectations to a clearer understanding of their circumstances.
In practice
Use this quote during a book club discussion to highlight character development.
The greedy search for money or success will almost always lead men into unhappiness. Why? Because that kind of life makes them depend upon things outside themselves.
It is better to teach a few things perfectly than many things indifferently...
We can talk frankly about our defects only to those who recognise our qualities.
Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny.
A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.
'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.
For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.
Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.
We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment but a way to act.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who'd dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
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