
“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”
John Irving book The Hotel New Hampshire
Source: The Hotel New Hampshire
Source: Point Omega
“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”
John Irving book The Hotel New Hampshire
Source: The Hotel New Hampshire
Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist
Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (December 10, 2014)
Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living
Source: The Importance of Living (1937), Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 13
“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.”
Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) Polish writer
“I'm a serious guy, and hungry, too.”
Billy Joe Shaver (1939) American singer-songwriter
Billy Joe Shaver talks Waylon, women, more (2014)
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer
Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality http://books.google.com/books?id=OHz70fY8t2UC&lpg=PA12&pg=PA12#v=onepage&q&f=false (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2012), p. 12. <br class="br">Nations and nationalism since 1780 programme, myth, reality (1992)
“It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.”
G. K. Chesterton book All Things Considered
"The Case for the Ephemeral"
All Things Considered (1908)
Context: I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think of, except dynamite.
Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.