Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?
Lillian HellmanRead
They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Interpretation
Writers should focus on their own work rather than getting caught up in the opinions of other writers.
Lillian Hellman's quote emphasizes the importance of individual expression and the risk of being influenced by others in a field that thrives on personal perspective. She advises young writers to concentrate on their unique voice and experiences instead of being distracted by the discussions surrounding writing or writer personas, which may lead them away from their authentic creativity.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to encourage participants to trust their voices.
Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.
Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.
Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.
When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.
When I was 10 years old, I loved - I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.
Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.
I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.