
“True greatness isn't so much what you do as who you are.”
Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 162
As quoted in [Nathan, David E., Computer scientist Leslie Lamport to grads: If you can’t write, it won’t compute, https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2017/may/commencement-lamport.html, Brandeis University, 17 January 2020, May 21, 2017]
“True greatness isn't so much what you do as who you are.”
Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 162
“There is greatness in doing something you hate for the sake of someone you love.”
Yet this great man who advised against marriage, was the happiest of men at the fireside of his family.
Views on marriage in The Manila Tribune. April 19, 1928.
BALIW
On her views of writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)
Source: Everything They Had: Sports Writing
The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.