03/04/2011

How to meet new, and old friends: LitBash 16

Here comes a great opportunity to pick up a book: an entire week of daily celebration of fascinating writers and their work, a chance to pick up a book, to read, and re-read. Yes: re-read! And why not? As the Chinese proverb goes: To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.

Some of the great writers who were...

Born this week:

Erich Muhsam, Germany
"I will probably have to bear the sin of betraying my ideals for the rest of my life."

Died this week:

Max Frisch, Switzerland
"I don’t care for politics in general. A writer’s place in a society and all that talk. The truth is that I write to express myself. I write for myself. Society, whatever it may be, is not my boss, I’m not a priest of a prof. The audience as a partner? I know more worthy partners. I do not publish because I feel the need to teach or preach, but because a writer, if he wants to discern his own self, needs some imaginary audience. I write only for myself."

Saul Bellow, USA
"There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."

Isaac Asimov, USA
"[Creationists] make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."

Francois Rabelais, France
"I never follow the clock: hours were made for man, not man for hours."

Charles Dickens, UK
"The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none."

Evelyn Waugh, UK
"The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish."

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