Igor > Igor's Quotes

“Omission is sometimes a defect and leads to unclearness. But other times it's a virtue and leads to ambiguity and an increase in narrative tension.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“a person and her language can't be separated. (If you want to know my truth, let me tell it to you in my words, in the diction and syntax natural to me.)”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“My point is that it’s not the flavor of your taste that matters; it’s the intensity with which you apply your taste that will cause the resulting work of art to feel highly organized.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life

“It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life

“in a highly organized system, the causation is more pronounced and intentional. The elements seem to have been more precisely selected. Things escalate decisively; everything is to purpose.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens, happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“the highest aspiration of art is to move the audience and that if the audience is moved, technical deficiencies are immediately forgiven.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“A story with a problem is like a person with a problem: interesting.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” “Formulate them correctly” might be taken to mean: “make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life

“A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Art is a simulator.”
― Brian Eno, What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory

“What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening - all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“Truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn' t want it in my house. Oedipus went looking for the truth and when he found it, it ruined him. It was a cruel horror of a joke. So much for the truth. I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“Remember, Robert, in life anything can happen. Even if you don't have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want.
- "Father”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“I have learned that the point of life's walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart.”
― Anasazi Foundation, The Seven Paths: Changing One's Way of Walking in the World

“You perhaps know that many people in Styria, in Moravia, in Serbia, in Poland, and even in Russia, believe in vampires.
[Chapter 6 A Bath Of Blood]”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

“Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden.. forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!”
― Hermann Hesse

“In ultima analisi, la questione non è come sfuggire all'Ipnocrazia - impresa impossibile nell'epoca della mediazione totale - ma come mantenere viva, all'interno del sistema stesso, la possibilità di una presenza diversa. Non una presenza puramente resistente, eternamente reattiva, ma una presenza creativa, capace di generare nuove forme di vita negli interstizi del controllo algoritmico.”
― Jianwei Xun, Ipnocrazia. Trump, Musk e la nuova architettura della realtà