“Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.”
Source: Sex & sensibility (1992), p. 20
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Julie Burchill 12
British writer 1959Related quotes
Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed): Art. Stephen Sondheim p. 408
“Making mistakes is a lot better than not doing anything.”
“Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.”
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
Context: I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.
“UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.”
Source: The Lorax (1972)
Source: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 34.