A Quote by Wole Soyinka
For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.
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In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.
Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.
A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.
Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge.
Leonard [Nimoy] was such a teacher for me. He was one of the most fully realized human beings I have ever known on every level - in his personal life with his personal relationships and his love for his wife and his evolution with his family. Then as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, as a poet, and as a photographer. He never stopped.
Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life.
The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.
In a certain sense a writer is 'selected' by his subject - his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
With 'swift-boating' now being used by the ignorant as a synonym for false charges, it's worth remembering that it was John Kerry who had to retract his statement about his secret Christmas mission to Cambodia, despite it having allegedly been 'seared, seared' into his memory.
In a perfect world, Joshua?s vertically gifted murderer would?ve had himself a monologue before rampaging, during which he loudly and clearly would?ve announced his full name, occupation, religious preference, preferably with his god?s country and time period of origin, his goals, dreams, and aspirations, and the location of his lair. But nobody had ever accused post-Shift Atlanta of being perfect.
The aim was simple: to deprive Karpov of his favourite occupation - standing at the board, staring straight at his opponent. While I was wearing these glasses, all he could admire was his own reflection.
If one of the brothers, being able ,to maintain himself by his own occupation, does not desire ,a share of the family property, he may be made separate ,by the others receiving a trifle out of his share to live upon.
Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
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