“A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he’s worth something. And if I know for sure that I’m a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Last update Aug. 22, 2022. History

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Andrei Tarkovsky 55

Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film th… 1932–1986

James Jones (1921–1977) American author

Letter to his brother Jeff, from Hawaii (7 April 1941); p. 11
To Reach Eternity (1989)

“Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

“Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or understand what he sees?”

William Least Heat-Moon book Blue Highways

Part Five, Chapter 6.
Blue Highways (1982)

“The writer has a fundamental responsibility to write well or to write the best he can, because if he doesn’t he’s not a writer. And when a writer writes, he’s always referring to a social and historical context…”

Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) Cuban poet/novelist/playwright

Source: On a writer’s responsibility in “The Literature of Uprootedness: An Interview with Reinaldo Arenas” https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-literature-of-uprootedness-an-interview-with-reinaldo-arenas in The New Yorker (2013 Dec 5)

“125. A monk is a man who considers himself one with all men because he seems constantly to see himself in every man.”

Evagrius Ponticus (345–399) Christian monk

Chapters on Prayer

“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: The Writing Life

“Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process…”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Man in the Modern Age (1933), p. 146

“When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Writing for a Hundred Years Hence
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

“Bukharin's a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Bol'shevistskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska 1912-1927, [Bolshevik Leadership, Correspondence 1912-1927], p. 90
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews

“A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he’s worth something. And if I know for sure that I’m a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?”

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Andrei Tarkovsky 55

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