“Give me a title and we'll start from there.”
Response to Harlan Ellison, at a suggestion to work together on a story, as quoted by Ellison in his introduction to "The Human Operators" in Partners in Wonder (2014)
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A. E. van Vogt 7
Canadian writer 1912–2000Related quotes
Bryan Adams
(1959) Canadian singer-songwriter
Straight from the Heart, written by Bryan Adams and Eric Kagna
Song lyrics, Cuts Like a Knife (1983)
John Gay
(1685–1732) English poet and playwright
The Vulture, the Sparrow, and other Birds. Comparable to: "When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, The post of honour is a private station", Joseph Addison, Cato, Act iv, scene 4
Fables (1727), Fables, Part the Second (1738)
Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 27
General sources
Yasunari Kawabata
(1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner
Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)
Context: I have an essay with the title "Eyes in their Last Extremity".
The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued:
"I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity."
Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five.
In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.
Albert Einstein
(1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
1920s, Viereck interview (1929)
Yiyun Li
(1972) Chinese American writer
On her thought process in “What I think: Yiyun Li” https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/12/10/what-i-think-yiyun-li (Princeton University; 2018 Dec 10)
Depuis que la machine à vapeur est la reine du monde, un titre est une absurdité, mais enfin, je suis affublé de cette absurdité. Elle m'écrasera si je ne la soutiens. Ce titre attire l'attention sur moi.
Source: Armance (1827), Ch. 14
