A Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Quote Topics

Anyone Art Noticing Oneself Repeating Without Writing

Quote Author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Lebanese - Scientist
Born: 1960

Fear of repeating oneself, of repeating oneself may be the greatest bugaboo of late capitalist society. The fear has been marketed so effectively that a will to sustain attention on any one thing can be cancelled out easily in favour of the latest distraction.

Jan Peacock

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

Shirley Jackson

No one recognizes me. And I hope that I can always go out without being recognized. Maybe that limits you in some way but I like to be able to pull my hair back in a ponytail and get groceries without anyone noticing.

Susanna Thompson

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?

Leon Trotsky

Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

Bruce Lee

If you are noticing what you appreciate and noticing what you are grateful for, you can't be noticing what you don't like.

Michael Losier

One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.

Robert Motherwell

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.

Dani Shapiro

I think one of the things that I took from Mel [Bochner] specifically was his ability to look at oneself and one's relationship to the history of art and the practice of art at arm's length, the ability to sort of clinically and coldly remove oneself from the picture and to see it simply as a set of rules, habits, systems, moving parts.

Kehinde Wiley

I paint with a language I can call my own... it takes a ruthless honesty with oneself. If one admires or is influenced by anyone else, one is not being true to oneself.

Scott Kahn

Basically I can't sleep without every single song I'm writing repeating endlessly, but I'm loving it again. Embracing the torture, as I'm assaulted by my own thoughts. Like a locust giving birth to earworms. Eeeeew!

Lady Gaga

We've reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My basic viewpoint is that without art we're alone.

Jamake Highwater

Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

Seth Godin

One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.

Michel Foucault

My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.