Kevin Egan > Kevin's Quotes

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Art, she said, is more nuanced than life. If a teacher is lecturing and looking out of smudged windows, smeared with obscenities (sure enough, ours were) it doesn't mean anything, in life, except that the cleaning crews are lazy. But in a story, if a professor is lecturing and the windows are smudged, we are obliged to think that his words are similarly untrandescent, right? ...
One of the great problems with artists, she said, is that they don't keep nuance and nature distinct. Import raw nature into a story or a poem and you've only ruined a story. Import nuance into life and you'll go mad. There'll suddenly be too much significance everywhere, a message in everything.”
― Clark Blaise

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.”
― Jim Harrison, The English Major