Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 8. "In Memoriam, Edward Thompson" (1993)
“It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?”
"The Strange Case of X", p. 196
City of Saints and Madmen (2001–2004)
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Jeff VanderMeer 24
American writer 1968Related quotes

As quoted in "From Bach to Kafka, or... about temptation - An interview by Emil Bassat http://darl.eu/intervie/84_05_30.htm" in Sofia News (30 May 1984).

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XXI Letters. Personal Records. Dated Notes.

“The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings.”
"How Not To Better Social Conditions" in Review of Reviews (January 1897), p. 39 https://books.google.com/books?id=J2FAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA39 · Full text online (with at least two typos — in the last sentence of the article) as "How Not To Help Our Poor Brother" http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/trhnthopb.pdf
1890s