Last minute gift ideas | LitBash 52

Looking for last-minute gift ideas? What better than something so intrinsically connected to the holiday season as writers who were...

Born this week:

Gustave Flaubert, France
"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

Heinrich Heine, Germany
"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

Jane Austen, UK
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Arthur C. Clarke, UK
"I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming."

Philip K. Dick, USA
"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night."

Died this week:

Jose Martiniano de Alencar, Brasil
"Opportunity makes the man."

Jean Richepin, France
"One may live without bread, not without roses."

Max Mell, Austria

Joseph Heller, USA
"When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, "Who has?""

This concludes the LitBash series - a full year of literary celebrations. Search this blog for LitBash to find additional reading suggestions.

Christmas party like no other | LitBash 51

This year's Christmas parties not so exciting? You're invited to join company like no other - writers who were...

Born this week:

Hans Hellmut Kirst, Germany
"All you have to do is anesthetize the masses by telling them they're an elite, that they've got a mission, that they're making history, that they're fulfilling their destiny and fighting for a better world — and they swallow it like lambs — even when a guttersnipe says it."

Carmen Martin Gaite, Spain
"There's no way of calculating how many ramifications a story will take on once one spies a gleam of attention in another's eyes."

Eugene Sue, France
"Virtue often trips and falls on the sharp-edged rock of poverty."

Albert Steffen, Switzerland

Alfred de Musset, France
"Great artists have no country."

Maurice Leblanc, France

Died this week:

Alexandre Dumas, France
"It is sometimes essential to government to cause a man’s disappearance without leaving any traces, so that no written forms or documents may defeat their wishes."

Anthony Trollope, UK
"I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's written language."

Marin Sorescu, Romania

Thornton Wilder, USA
"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."

Jose Donoso, Chile
"I once asked the servants why none of them had blue eyes like my aunts. They replied that only the ladies could afford to buy the blue glass cups in which they kept their eyes at night to make them more blue and beautiful, and furthermore, if we went on asking silly questions, the rats that steal the faces of inquisitive children in order to wear them as masks would come to take us to live in the twilit world between the ceiling and the roof where no one ever dared to go."

Luigi Pirandello, Italy
"Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!"

Artur Nils Lundkvist, Sweden

Book picks for the week | LitBash 50

Need something to read, but don't know to chose? Try writers who were...

Born this week:

Stefan Zweig, Austria
"It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent - prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls."

Alberto Moravia, Italy
"An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity."

Konstantin Simonov, Russia
"I don't know how others may see it, but for me, human friendship is the most precious feeling on earth. That feeling has its greatest strength when times are hard; and in war, times are very hard. "

Louisa May Alcott, USA
"Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling."

Jonathan Swift, UK
"I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells - a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there: and often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a-half under-ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep upon no wiser reason than because it is wondrous dark."

Mark Twain, USA
"I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever."

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Canada

Joseph Conrad (Born Józef Korzeniowski), Poland / UK
"It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes."

Died this week:

Conrad Meyer, Switzerland

Oscar Wilde, UK
"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

Donatien Alphone Francois de Sade (Marquis de Sade), France
The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime—for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold."

Namik Kemal, Turkey

Edmond Rostand, France
"To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero."

Robert Louis Stevenson, UK
"In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy."

Gustav Meyrink, Austria
"I have not let myself be stultified by science, whose highest goal is to furnish a `waiting room', which it would be best to tear down."

Re-Kindling the fire in your heart | LitBash 49

A book will light a fire in your heart. Pick a book by a writer who was...

Born this week:

Voltaire, France
"What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbor's, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

George Eliot, UK
"I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best."

Andre Gide, France
"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore."

Charles Vildrac, France

Mats Traat, Estonia

Carlo Collodi, Italy

Lope de Vega, Spain

Eugene Ionesco, France / Romania
"No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa."

Died this week:

Jack London, USA
"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog."

Aldous Huxley, UK
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

C. S. Lewis, UK
"100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased."

Anthony Burgess, UK

Andre Malraux, France
"One cannot create an art that speaks to me when one has nothing to say."

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Denmark

Upton Sinclair, USA
"American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it."

Yukio Mishima, Japan
"There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess."

Arnold Zweig, Germany

Alexandre Dumas, France
"It is sometimes essential to government to cause a man’s disappearance without leaving any traces, so that no written forms or documents may defeat their wishes. It has always been so and always will be. Governments change yet they remain all alike."

Eugene O'Neill, USA
"One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate — and remain forever scatheless."

Brighten up the darkest autumn | LitBash 48

Short days? Long evenings? Nothing on TV? A book brightens up the most dreary of days, and helps pass the longest evening. Here are some writers who were...

Born this week:

Hussein Taha, Egypt

Astrid Lindgren, Sweden
"There is very little you can beat into a child, but no limit to what you can hug out of it."

Gerhart Hauptmann, Germany
"Poetry evokes out of words the resonance of the primordial world."

Heinz Piontek, Germany

Rene Arcos, France

Henri Bosco, France

Jeannie Ebner, Austria

Klaus Mann, Germany
"Work is the never ending burden without which all other burdens would be unbearable."

Selma Lagerlof, Sweden
"It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be."

Nadine Gordimer, South Africa
"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area."

Died this week:

Wilhelm Raabe, Germany
"A man without imagination is like a bird without wings."

Albert Engstrom, Sweden

Marcel Proust, France
"Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people."

Leo Tolstoy, Russia
"Subtleties, allegories, humorous fancies, the wildest generalizations abound, but nothing simple and clear, nothing going straight to the point, that is, to the problem of life.
Besides these graceful frivolities, our literature is full of simple nastiness and brutality, of arguments that would lead men back in the most refined way to primal barbarism, to the principles not only of the pagan, but of the animal life, which we have left behind 5,000 years ago."

Leonardo Sciascia, Italy
"I hate and detest Sicily in so far as I love it, and in so far as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it."

How to choose a book | LitBash 47

Are you overwhelmed by bookstore shelves that are brimming with books? Don't know which book to pick? Use lists, such as one with writers who were...

Born this week:

Albert Camus, France
"A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously."

William Wharton, Germany

Bram Stoker, UK
"I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome."

Margaret Mitchell, USA

Peter Weiss, Germany
"I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. ... That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country."

Peer Hultberg, Denmark

Ivan Turgenev, Russia

Imre Kertesz, Hungary
"If one takes the path of success, then one ends up either successful or unsuccessful, there is no third alternative."

Carl Sagan, USA
"Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain."

Friedrich von Schiller, Germany
"Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn't roar?"

Max Mell, Austria

Arnold Zweig, Germany

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russia
"Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?"

Kurt Vonnegut, USA
"Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books ... why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with ... humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world."

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico
"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."

Michael Ende, Germany
"Time is Life."

Robert Louis Stevenson, UK
"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye."

Died this week:

Carl Erik Soya, Denmark

Ken Kesey, USA
"The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful."

Emmuska Orczy, Hungary / UK
"I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should."

Guido Piovene, Italy

Elemir Bourges, France

Things cats and people have in common | LitBash 46

What do cats and people have in common? Both can live several lives. You can too - by reading a book and getting into the skin of its protagonist. Start with books by authors who were...

Born this week:

Hermann Broch, Austria
"The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system."

Ilse Aichinger, Austria
"The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed."

Gunter de Bruyn, Germany

Moa Martinson, Sweden

Andre Malraux, France
"The sons of torture victims make good terrorists."

Ciro Alegria, Peru

Rene Maran, Martinique
"Hatred is one long wait."

Robert Musil, Austria
"I am not only convinced that what I say is false, but also that what one might say against it is false. Despite this, one must begin to talk about it. In such a case the truth lies not in the middle, but rather all around, like a sack, which, with each new opinion one stuffs into it, changes its form, and becomes more and more firm."

James Jones, USA
"I don't think that combat has ever been written about truthfully; it has always been described in terms of bravery and cowardice. I won't even accept these words as terms of human reference any more. And anyway, hell, they don't even apply to what, in actual fact, modern warfare has become."

Died this week:

Gertrud von Le Fort, Germany

Alexander Bek, Russia

Hans Erich Nossack, Germany
"Why go on? I mean, why record all this? Wouldn’t it be better to surrender it to oblivion for all time? For those who were there certainly don’t have to read it. And the others, and those who will come later? What if they read it only to enjoy something strange and uncanny and to make themselves feel more alive? Does it take an apocalypse to do that? Or a descent into the underworld?"

William Styron, USA
"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."

Leon Bloy, France
"There are places in the heart that do not yet exist; suffering has to enter in for them to come to be."

Karel Capek, Czech
"Art must not serve might."

Carl Sternheim, Germany

Johannes Urzidil, Austria

Claude Aveline, France

John Fowles, UK
"There are only two races on this planet—the intelligent and the stupid."

Maurice Leblanc, France

Antonio Baldini, Italy

Blooming spring in autumn | LitBash 45

Autumn gets you down? Prefer Spring? Every book is a blooming flower. Enter the garden - start with authors who were...

Born this week:

Armand Lanoux, France

Venedict Yerofeyev, Russia

Ulrich Plenzdorf, Germany

Erasmus, Netherlands
"The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war."

Kare Holt, Norway

Sylvia Plath, USA
"Nothing reaks quite as bad as a pile of unpublished manuscripts."

Evelyn Waugh, UK
"Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else."

Otto Flake, Germany

Jean Giraudoux, France
"As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum."

Jean Rostand, France
"Kill a man, one is a murderer; kill a million, a conqueror; kill them all, a God."

Carl Erik Soya, Denmark

Died this week:

Mary McCarthy, USA
"We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story."

Gerard Walschap, Belgium

Carlo Collodi, Italy
Pinocchio

Arkady Gaidar, Russia

Heinz Piontek, Germany

Willi Bredel, Germany

Walter Raleigh, UK
"Better were it to be unborn than ill-bred."

Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Russia
"History is fond of her grandchildren, for it offers them the marrow of the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in breaking."

Frances Burnett, UK
"And this, my lovely child, is your garden."

William Wharton, USA
"What is love? As far as I can tell, it is passion, admiration, and respect. If you have two, you have enough. If you have all three, you dont have to die to go to heaven."

Pio Baroja, Basque

Burn these books | LitBash 44

If books entertain you - burn them! Start with authors who were...

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

Good, or bad, they're sacred | LitBash 43

Books from writers who were...

Born this week:

Claude Simon, France
"To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective. Finally, writing transforms."

Harold Pinter, UK
"There can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

Gertrud von Le Fort, Germany

Francois Mauriac, France
"Most men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures."

Takiji Kobayashi, Japan

Mikhail Lermontov, Russia
"Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning."

Alfred Neumann, Germany

Bernard von Brentano, Germany

Manuel de Fonseca, Portugal

Italo Calvino, Italy
"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."

Oscar Wilde, UK
"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."

Dino Buzzati Traverso, Italy

Jose Saramago, Portugal
"Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed."

Gunter Grass, Germany
"Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred."

Died this week:

Alexy K. Tolstoy, Russia

Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Denmark

Anatole France, France
"Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue."

Ernst Didring, Sweden

Hjalmar Soderberg, Sweden

Marcel Ayme, France

Louis Guilloux, France

Danilo Kis, Serbia
"Do not get involved with anyone, a writer is alone."

Cure for autumn blues | LitBash 42

Days are getting shorter? Nights are getting longer? Nothing on TV? A great opportunity to pick up a book! Start with writers who were...

Born this week:

Louis Aragon, France
"Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized."

James Alfred Wight, UK
"For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents. The words 'My book,' as in 'I'll put that in it one day,' became a sort of running joke. Eventually she said, 'Look, I don't want to offend you, but you've been saying that for 25 years. If you were going to write a book, you'd have done it. You're never going to do it now. Old vets of 50 don't write books.' So I purchased a lot of paper right then and started to write."

Gore Vidal, USA
"Envy is the central fact of American life."

Denis Diderot, France
"It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none."

Teresa de la Parra, Venezuela

Flann O'Brien, Ireland

Charles Bertin, Belgium

Sig Halvard Dagerman, Sweden

Jose Donoso, Chile

Vaclav Havel, Czech
"Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy."

Frank Herbert, USA

Died this week:

Ivan Yefremov, Russia

Henry Fielding, UK
"Love and scandal are the best sweeteneers of tea."

Felix Salten, Austria
Author of Bambi

Jean Giono, France

Andre Maurois, France
"It is easy to be admired when one remains inaccessible."

Too much of a good thing | LitBash 41

Here's one example of when it may be "too much of a good thing" (on the other hand it's likely a case of not having enough time to read all these wonderful books) - writers who were...

Born this week:

Tryggve Andersen, Norway

Grazia Deledda, Italy

Josef Skvorecky, Czech
"Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism."

Prosper Merimee, France

Miguel de Cervantes, Spain
"Can we ever have too much of a good thing?"

Johan Falkberget, Norway
"It is the result of the good word or the great, not the narrow-minded or petty criticism. These have not yet changed the world one louse's step."

Truman Capote, USA

Graham Greene, UK
"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

Doris Lessing, UK
"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."

Died this week:

Hugh Lofting, UK / USA

Alberto Moravia, Italy
"Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand."

Ivan Goncharov, Russia
"It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required."

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brasil

Vladimir Zazubrin, Russia

Joe Bousquet, France

Andre Breton, France
"The man who can't visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot."

John Dos Passos, USA
"The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can."

Elia Kazan, USA

Emile Zola, France
"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."

Shusaku Endo, Japan

Patrick White, Australia
"Possibly all art flowers more readily in silence."

How long can you hold your breath? | LitBash 40

If "All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath" then you'd better learn to swim first. Then plunge with writers who were...

Born this week:

Mika Waltari, Finland
"Life is a hot day, perhaps death is a cool night. Life is a shallow bay, perhaps death is a clear, deep sea."

William Golding, UK
"The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth."

Upton Sinclair, USA
"American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt"

Arturo Barea, Spain

Albert Ehrismann, Swiss

Hanns Cibulka, Germany

H. G. Wells, UK
"Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it."

Ivan Vazov, Bulgaria

Emmuska Orczy, Hungary / UK

Horace Walpole, UK
"Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent."

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, USA
"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."

Ladislav Fuks, Czech

William Faulkner, USA
"Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie."

Died this week:

Italo Calvino, Italy
"I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance."

Walter Scott, Scotland
"Revenge is the sweetest morsel to the mouth, that ever was cooked in hell."

Pierre-Henri Simon, France

Prosper Merimee, France

Wilkie Collins, UK
"Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women."

Francoise Sagan, France
"Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true."

Erich Maria Remarque, Germany
"Work does not take much of an artist’s time, on the contrary, it takes
the least time. The idea, however, and its long maturing period is
equally important. Creative work is divided into active and passive."

Why are we here? What's life all about? | LitBash 39

"Why are we here? What's life all about?" Find out the truth... in tales "that never have been and never will be." Start with writers who were...

Born this week:

Stanisław Lem, Poland
"Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way."

Elsa Triolet, France

Ursula Hontsch, Germany

Sherwood Anderson, USA
"I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."

Roald Dahl, UK
"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you."

Manuel Tamayo y Baus, Spain

Agatha Christie, UK
"Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions."

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Argentina
"Life is a game of chess and you never really know when you are winning or losing."

Masaoka Shiki, Japan
"I had thought that satori is to die without fear anytime. But it is a wrong guess. The satori is to live unconcernedly anytime."

Ken Kesey, USA
"I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. ... The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

Standish James O'Grady, Ireland

Died this week:

Janis Rainis, Latvia

James Fenimore Cooper, USA
"The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms."

Oriana Fallaci, Italy
"There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape."

Dan Andersson, Sweden

Alfred de Vigny, France
"History is a novel whose author is the people."

Herman Melville, USA
"Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence."

Sean O'Casey, Ireland
"Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich man to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life."

Great reads for labor day | LitBash 38

Enjoy great literature from writers who were:

Born this week:

Alexei K. Tolstoy, Russia

Alexander Kuprin, Russia
"Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this—that there is no horror!"

Elia Kazan, USA / Greece

Alfred Jarry, France
"To be weird! That is my goal!"

Leo Tolstoy, Russia
"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."

Vytautas Bubnys, Lithuania

D. H. Lawrence, UK
"God is only a great imaginative experience."

Died this week:

Auguste Comte, France
"The dead govern the living."

Emilio Cecchi, Italy

Kir Bulychev, Russia

Lucien Descaves, France

Paul Zech, Germany

Karen Blixen, Denmark
"God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road."

Mary Wollstonecraft, UK
"The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless."

Eleanor Dark, Australia

Fascinating reads for the end of summer | LitBash 37

Looking for a fascinating book to read before the end of the summer? Start with writers who were...

Born this week:

Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgium
"We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us."

Robert Merle, France

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, UK
"It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world."

Theophile Gautier, France
"There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly"

Walter Scott, Scotland
"A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect."

William Saroyan, USA
"The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops."

Eldridge Cleaver, USA
"The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less."

Edgar Rice Burroughs, USA
"I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other."

Paul Bourget, France
"At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered."

Hans Aanrud, Norway

Ignacio Agusti, Spain

Francois de Chateaubriand, France
"As soon as a true thought has entered our mind, it gives a light which makes us see a crowd of other objects which we have never perceived before."

Leonard Frank, Germany

Died this week:

Henri Barbusse, France
"Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide."

Ilya Ehrenburg, Russia
"You could cover the whole world with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through."

Goffredo Parise, Italy

Giuseppe Giacosa, Italy

Francois Mauriac, France
"One can touch a living soul through a curtain of vice and crime no matter how dense and dark: but vulgarity is an insurmountable barrier."

Johannes Bobrowski, Germany

J.R.R. Tolkien, UK
"Wars are not favourable to delicate pleasures."

Ivan Turgenev, Russia

Jean Rostand, France
"I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell."

Victor Nekrasov, Russia

Georges Simenon, France
"Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy."

Writers who have nothing to say, but say it just right | LitBash 35

Some writers have nothing to say, but they say it beautifully, passionately, and engagingly. Find out for yourself; start with writers who were...

Born this week:

Bernardo Guimaraes, Brasil

Edith Nesbit, UK

Charles Bukowski, USA
"People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love."

V. S. Naipaul, UK / India
"Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two."

Alain Robbe-Grillet, France
"The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it."

Ogden Nash, USA
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of."

Howard Lovecraft, USA
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown..."

Vilhelm Moberg, Sweden
"I have met the town idiot, who declares that all the automobiles in the world are of less value than a single human life. I have met the most harmless inhabitant of Pine Beach: a wise man."

Mary Margaret Kaye, UK

Died this week:

Margaret Mitchell, USA
"Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them!"

Honore de Balzac, France
"Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact."

Leonhard Frank, Germany

Tibor Dery, Hungary

Blaise Pascal, France
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain
"Old women can see through walls."

Ladislav Fuks, Czech

Henrik Pontoppidan, Denmark

Complete a Writer | LitBash 34

A writer is incomplete without readers. Complete one now, start with those who were:

Born this week:

Pamela Lyndon Travers, UK
"A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns."

Jorge Amado, Brasil

Alex Haley, USA
"In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it."

Fernando Arrabal, Spain

John Galsworthy, UK
"The world's a fine place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in it yet."

Died this week:

Frederick Marryat, UK

Hermann Hesse, Germany
"it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!"

Ulrich Plenzdorf, Germany

Edith Wharton, USA
"No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity."

Sandor Brody, Hungary

Thomas Mann, Germany
"We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side."

Ian Fleming, UK

Gilbert Cesbron, France

H. G. Wells, UK
"Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalent but imperfect machine."

Rainer Brambach, Switzerland

Bertolt Brecht, Germany
"People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart."

Elias Canetti, Austria
"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well."

Taste, chew, swallow, and digest | LitBash 33

Francis Bacon said: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Gobble up as many as you want. Start with authors who were...

Born this week:

Herman Melville, USA
"It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness."

Romulo Gallegos, Venezuela

Witold Gombrowicz, Poland
"Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre."

Knut Hamsun, Norway
"And love became the world's origin and the world's ruler, yet littered its path is with flowers and blood, flowers and blood."

Guy de Maupassant, France
"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all."

Jiri Weil, Czech

Carl Brosboll, Denmark

Died this week:

William Burroughs, USA
"A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on."

Joseph Conrad, Poland / UK
"It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose."

Sidonie Colette, France
"There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia
"Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read."

Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark
"Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken."

Salama Musa, Egypt

Jorge Amado, Brasil

Rosario Castellanos, Mexico

The three Bs of summer | LitBash 32

Summertime means rivers of cold beer. You're spending dearly to quench your thirst. But summer also means plenty of good reads. Yet, as John Lubbock observed: "How little our libraries cost us as compared with our liquor cellars." You can balance out your summer spending budget with the three Bs: a beach, a beer, and a book. Start with authors who were:

Born this week:

Elias Canetti, Austria
"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well."

Ambroise-Marie Robert Carré, France

Andre Maurois, France
"Revolt against a tyrant is legitimate; it can succeed. Revolt against human nature is doomed to failure."

Aldous Huxley, UK
"Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead."

Vladimir Korolenko, Russia

Guido Piovene, Italy

Alexandre Dumas, France
"Sleeping on a plank has one advantage - it encourages early rising."

Malcolm Lowry, UK
"What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?"

Eyvind Johnson, Sweden
"One should think that you're someone living in the future and that you have to judge - approve or disapprove - the I that acts today, the I that keeps up or fails."

Ernst Glaeser, Germany

Emily Bronte, UK
"I'm now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself."

Aasmund Vinje, Norway

Primo Levi, Italy
"A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful."

Walter Vogt, Switzerland

Died this week:

Mikhail Lermontov, Russia
"Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea."

Gertrude Stein, USA
"Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume."

Cyrano de Bergerac, France
"You are now bearing the punishment for the shortcomings of your world. Here, as in your world, there are benighted people who cannot tolerate thinking about things they are not accustomed to."

Erich Kastner, Germany

Helge Krog, Norway

Denis Diderot, France
"From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, France
"Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye."