Source: Pearls are a Nuisance
“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.”
“What the media are telling you to be afraid of are the wrong things…”
Interview with filmmaker Michael Moore, Rolling Stone (January 2003)
2003
Context: What the media are telling you to be afraid of are the wrong things... Fear is a necessary ingredient of our survival instincts.
Citizenship Papers (2003), The Failure of War
Context: It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.
As quoted in American Chronicle (1945) by Ray Stannard Baker, quoted on unnumbered page opposite p. 1
1920s and later
“A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.”
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
