In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories a...re nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great practical difference between the word, written or spoken, and the visual image is that we cannot read the former unless ...we have been initiated into the mystery of language, whereas visual images can be made intelligible to all men who have eyes.... The spiritual difference between the written word and the visual image is equally great. Precise though a word is, evocative though it be, the actual machinery of visual perception is not engaged. All that takes place, takes place now within the mind; the retina and the neurons sleep; we are in a world which has been created by old, long-stored stimuli; the accidents of energy exterior to ourselves have been totally excluded from it. Even the spoken word is further from this spiritual purity than the word upon the page, for sounds have at least a sensual immediacy of a sort, but the written word is only the ghost of a sound. We have entered now into a realm not of images but of substitutes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicate...d to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking ti...me for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive for...m of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brai...nwashing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right f...rom the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but... it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »