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Anthony Steyning |
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Anthony Steyning's Quotes |
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When writing I create characters I would love to have met, replacing live ones who let me down or bore me to death.
Aggression is an expression of impotence, not of strength Goodness is awareness Suspicion is a liar´s child To a blind man all the world goes naked Populism promises to pay the rent. But not yours, my friend! To hate indiscriminately is a measure of one's own tragic shortcoming Atheists don't eat converted rice Irrational fear begets irrational loathing Exaggerated national pride emanates from a very dangerous shortage of individual self-esteem The intolerant will always demand tolerance under laws they reject Enforcers are compensated not to think Immorality is the domain not of the atheist, but of the non-thinker He who lives by the wind, becomes the wind: intermittently influential but on the whole dismissible The battle between good & evil boils down to the conflict between moderns and primitives Letters are pebbles but words bricks, holding up beautiful structures and even music sometimes Behind a woman's tears, lies the greatest human strength I know If God gave us life, He sure has a bewilderingly cruel way of taking it back Besides his own wicked ways, man has brought some order in the situation whereby the sole purpose of bringing him to life, seems to have been to pound the crap out of him Mars has life ancient fundamentalists left behind Those encouraging suicide are never home when it is their turn The human race is a bit like water: slowly flowing to the lowest point, evaporating & rising to the top, only to keep falling again Permanently emerging states are permanently led by the permanently adolescent It takes centuries for sense to become common Do not add to life's intimidations Life is like living with a murderer in closed quarters : it should be treated with kidgloves and utmost decorum Most will automatically admire all those the others admire Like to tango, it takes two to be decent! It is unwise for sheep to negotiate a non-aggression pact with wolves Can't ban guns? Ban bullets! Some climbers stab the back and step over the body, accuse another, steal, execute, imprison and bomb, and can do all this because, admirably apparently, sustained by their faith... History shows it's impossible for a people to prosper, if the art of compromise hasn't entered its culture Life being meaningless is not nearly as serious as leading one that is pointless Most politicians are brilliant only at getting elected Optimism is despair in disguise A writers' dream is a watering hole with a clock that runs backwards: always time for one more drink or have a long lost friend walk in again. The Biggest Lie of all: Editors and Agents look for Originality. After submitting something out of the ordinary, they always react as if you sodomized them in the lane behind their Granny's cottage on a blissful, August Sunday morning, before mass If time bends, so does truth. There's indelible gravity travelling moral space: What was true a moment ago is no longer quite so. A good writer captures this phenomenon. Writing is having the courage to constantly pull the rug out from underneath yourself. Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett both suffered from a form of dehydration: lips aching, dying of thirst yet unable to drink faith's liquid words. Polite Jazz and Tropical Prose suck. I feel scandalously betrayed the word Umlaut hasn't one, and that Ravel's Bolero or the word Anagram are nothing of the sort. Take the dead straightest steel beam you can locate, then order a few million putting them end to end circumventing the globe. Of course they'll have made a perfect circle, proving that absolutely nothing is really straight in the universe and that even the apparently most precise item is not 100% what you think it is. Such is the truth. My remarkableness goes remarkably unremarked
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