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The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.
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Ask any girl what she'd rather be than beautiful, and she'll say more beautiful.
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Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.
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God is as just as he is merciful.
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If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?
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If you do not use a muscle or any part of the body, it tends to become atrophic. So is the case with the brain. The more you use it, the better it becomes.
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James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.
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But having had your bright, fresh, original idea, the really hard part is turning it into a successful product. That's what takes all the sweat.
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Petty laws breed great crimes.
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National identity is a motion. It's something you're inside, you don't get what's happening, you can't see it from above. And that's where you have to write. You can't see what's happening now or what's going to happen, so you just dive into it and write.
