The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DelilloRead
Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.
Interpretation
Stories must engage with our fears to hold significance.
This quote by Don Delillo emphasizes the importance of authenticity and emotional depth in storytelling. It suggests that for a narrative to resonate and be meaningful, it must confront and reflect the profound fears and anxieties that we as humans experience, thereby absorbing and addressing the terror within us.
In practice
In a writing workshop, this quote can inspire participants to delve deeper into their characters' struggles.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. β¨He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way heβs carrying a gun. β¨This is one of the essential images in American mythology.
Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.
I suffer from life and from other people. I canβt look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful β only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
The world is governed by opinion.
In nature there is a fundamental unity running through all the diversity we see about us. Religions are given to mankind so as to accelerate the process of realisation of fundamental unity.
For the division of labor demands from the individual an ever more one-sided accomplishment, and the greatest advance in a one-sided pursuit only too frequently means dearth to the personality of the individual.
Dwarves are not heroes, but a calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much.
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