“We must never lose sight of the deep and indestructible connections between translation/literature and life. If what we write is to have a chance of living on the page, then we must also live, we must observe life, we must experience and learn to transmute that experience. Translators no less than creative writers.”
Public Lecture (2018)
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John Minford 9
New Zealand sinologist 1946Related quotes

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
Variant: To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.

Quoted in [Richard C. Reuben, Man in the Middle, California Lawyer, October 1992, 35]

“When we do fantasy, we must not lose sight of reality.”
As quoted in Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (Disney Editions, 2001) p. 102

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Context: We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions.

The Country Life.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

"On the limits of quantum theory: Contextuality and the quantum–classical cut", Annals of Physics 327 (2012) 1890–1932
“English translation: Life of lives, beginning to the end. We are alive forever.”
"The Celts", from The Celts (1987) Translations for The Celts http://www.pathname.com/enya/celts.html#the-celts, from Enya: Translations and Lyrics. English translation by Fidelma McGinn, Daniel Quinlan, and Willie Arbuckle.
Song lyrics