Glenn Russell > Glenn's Quotes

“Strictly speaking, I never had nor do I have projects. I simply get carried away by the circumstances. I accept the ones that seem pleasant and try to avoid the ones I don’t like… If I think of a story, and I don’t feel bothered writing it, then perfect, I write it. And if I can’t think of anything, that won’t make me commit suicide or bring me down into depression. I take literature as a pleasant activity, without deadlines or schedules, and never as a job or a burden that creates inconveniences or pains.

During certain times in my life I’ve had to carry out very unpleasant jobs (for example, I was an office worker), and for that reason I would never let literature (which is, above all, a game and a pleasure) turn out to be a job.”
― Fernando Sorrentino

“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.”
― Joseph Campbell

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Art is the accomplice of love.”
― Remy de Gourmont

“A yogi is much more disciplined in his speech. Yogic tradition has it that speech must pass before three barriers prior to being uttered aloud. These barriers come in the form of three questions: Is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary? (112-113)”
― Prem Prakash, The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion A Modern Translation of the Narada Bhakti Sutras (Transformational Bo

“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.”
― Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within

“Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living”
― John Cage

“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”
― Osho

“If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.”
― Epicurus

“I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.”
― Epicurus

“Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“…he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“Yes, I have loved, as no one on earth ever loved, with an insensate and furious love, so violent that I wonder it did not break my heart.”
― Théophile Gautier, The Works of Théophile Gautier

“I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved.”
― Théophile Gautier, My Fantoms

“To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.”
― Théophile Gautier

“I longed to be able to gather my whole life-force into a single impulse, and transmit it to her and blow into her frozen remains the fire that was consuming me.”
― Théophile Gautier, My Fantoms

“‎The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.”
― Octave Mirbeau

“Come now, don't make such a funeral face. It isn't dying that's sad; it's living when you're not happy.”
― Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices

“Chastity is the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.”
― Remy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris

“I am interested only in "nonsense"; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.”
― Daniil Kharms

“One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.”
― Daniil Kharms

“The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.”
― Peter Matthiessen, Wildlife in America

“We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.”
― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

“This world is painted on a wild dark metal”
― Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country