A Quote by Rebecca Solnit

I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits? — © Rebecca Solnit
I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture - storytellers? Hermits?
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't become an actor. If perhaps I'd stayed on at university and become an academic.
I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.
It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.
People who are alone all the time never grow. Those hermits just stay the same. It's only through relationships. Relationships change us and make us grow.
I feel that there are two kinds of writers. I feel that there are writers who are storytellers and then there are those just working out their obsessions. I think I'm a combination. I think, at least for these books, I'm going with fear. I've always been interested in fear. Fear is something I've dealt with in life, and I think it's the main motivating factor of everything, almost. From sex to politics.
I think we're right up there with Herman's Hermits and the other greats. Maybe somewhere between Herman's Hermits and the Gershwins.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
I sometimes wish the trade unionists who work in the mass media, those who are writers and broadcasters and secretaries and printers and lift operators of Thomson House would remember that they too are members of our working class movement and have a responsibility to see that what is said about us is true.
I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn't work.
Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.
Inspired men have been raised up, who have given us our form of government, and the code of laws by which we are controlled, the best ever evolved by man, so far as we are able to judge. The Lord has strengthened the arms of the patriots who have defended us against the assaults of all those who have come up against us, and delivered us until today, from those who would have torn us asunder. Against all opposition, I sometimes think almost against ourselves, the Lord has brought us to our present condition, until this nation, like a city set on a hill, has become the light of the world.
I sometimes wonder if I would have become a writer if what happened to my father hadn't happened.
On the Bigotry of Culture: : it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.
I'd been on everybody else's show and there was always a preinterview. Somebody would come with a tape recorder and you'd talk for three or four hours, and they'd take it back and it would be transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows, Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etc. And then they choose the answers that will be most evocative on their show.
Writers are storytellers. So are readers.
Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the poor rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said.
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