“I'm very much against the notion of the Great Man, the Great Figure who is telling us all how to behave. Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.”
14th time lucky (2005)
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John Banville97
Irish writer 1945Related quotes
Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.
The management philosophy here really is to give people enough rope to hang themselves. We hire people to tell us what to do. That's what we pay them for. <br class="br">1990s <br class="br">Source: Steve Jobs, 1996, Fresh Air radio interview by Terry Gross, npr.org http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-science-is-a-liberal-art, audio 26:30/31:05 <br class="br">Source: Steve Jobs 1982, interview in InfoWorld March 4, 1982, p.15 books.google https://books.google.fr/books?id=gT4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA15&dq=rope
“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art”
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Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933) Greek poet
“The Rest I Will Tell to Those Down to Hades” http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=173&cat=4 <br class="br">Collected Poems (1992)
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Paul Tanner, in "Free Women: 1"<!-- p. 173 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.