Born this week:
Simon Vestdijk, Netherlands
"If it were to be claimed that intentional verse is not yet poetry, then I would equally have the right to claim that the most consummate, most differentiated sound poems are no longer poetry but a singular imitation of another art: music or declamation."
Arthur Miller, USA
"I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge."
Pierre de Laclos, France
"I was astonished at the pleasure to be derived from doing good."
Ernst Didring, Sweden
Mikhail Kuzmin, Russia
Tibor Dery, Hungary
Kir Bulychev, Russia
Niels Albert Dam, Denmark
Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala
"If you write novels merely to entertain - then burn them! This might be the message delivered with evangelical fervour since if you do not burn them they will anyway be erased from the memory of the people where a poet or novelist should aspire to remain. Just consider how many writers there have been who - down the ages - have written novels to entertain! And who remembers them now?"
Elfriede Jelinek, Austria
"Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong."
Ursula K. Le Guin, USA
"To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible."
Gianni Rodari, Italy
Died this week:
Karl Kautsky, Germany
"The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government."
Jean Amery, Austria
Jonathan Swift, UK / Ireland
"Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style."
Jack Reed, USA
"War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth tellers, choking the artists, sidetracking reforms, revolutions, and the working of social forces."
Jack Kerouac, USA
"All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land."
Charles Bertin, Belgium
Jose Andrade, Brasil
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