A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham
A good story is obviously a difficult thing to invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.
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Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.
Trouble, hardship, difficulty, pain, suffering, conflict, tragedy, evil - they're all part of the [Christian] Story. Indeed, the problem of evil is the reason there's any Story at all.
People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.
Despising anything that was easy to achieve because if no sacrifice was involved, it obviously isn't worth having.
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
For families across the UK who are income-poor, but more than that, whose lives are blighted by worklessness, educational failure, family breakdown, problem debt and poor health, as well as other problems, giving them an extra pound - say through increased benefits - will not address the reason they find themselves in difficulty in the first place.
For any film or any web show, the story dictates everything. If it is a good story, it obviously has good characters in it.
It is expected that a children's story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was.
The greatest step forward in human evolution was made when society began to help the weak and the poor, instead of oppressing and despising them.
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
If something comes that it is so extreme that you have difficulty thinking of it as a good thing, don't think of it as a good thing and kid yourself. To the extent that you can, don't label it a bad thing. Refusing to label something a bad thing opens you up to possibilities you would not have even considered otherwise.
Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?
Obviously, the good thing about golf, it's difficult to really, really blow it after five holes unless it goes really, really, really... really, really, really wrong. But you still have 13 to go, and if you have a good run, where you make five or six birdies, you can get it back somehow.
I'm not a big dreamer. I never have been.The only thing I've sort of obviously extracted from the research of dreams is that I don't think there's a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it's up to, obviously, the individual. Obviously, we suppress things, emotions, things during the day - thoughts that we obviously haven't thought through enough, and in that state of sleep when our subconscious or mind just sort of randomly fires off different surreal story structures, and when we wake up we should pay attention to these things.
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