Ismail Kadare Quotes

I'd love to have written a film and it to be regarded as good. I'd just like to be doing things that are good, really. I think that's all you can aim for. I find it odd when actors say they just want to do films or plays or television. A lot of films aren't very good; a lot of television isn't very good; a lot of plays aren't very good.

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.

Even when you're producing difficult material and you get emotional, after it you feel good; you feel like you've done a good job, or had an emotional release. I've always enjoyed that, but you go home and think, that was a good day's work, and you move on.

I think that's why I became good at art. It was something that I could do that I could be really proud of.

Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.

I may not be much good at most things, but if I didn't have the pleasure of planning and installing shows, and doing it better than anyone else, I would have stopped buying art many years ago.

When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

Kabbalah is all about change. It isn't about being proud of our good qualities: the wisdom is about transforming our darkness into light.

Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there's the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing.

To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.

After an eternity of seeking the sudden threshold of seeing and finding leaves one filled with a strange paradox of ecstasy and grief. I was born to see.

I extend my greetings and good wishes to all our citizens on the joyous occasion of Deepawali. The festival of lights, celebrated with gaiety and enthusiasm all over the country, signifies the victory of good over evil and is an appropriate occasion for us to resolve to follow the high ideals in life.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or there because they're lucky.

Pondering, which means to weigh mentally, to deliberate, to meditate, can achieve the opening of the spiritual eyes of one's understanding.

I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing... like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.

I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery.

Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God

In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.

Spiritual life is like living water that springs up from the very depths of our own spiritual experience. In spiritual life everyone has to drink from his or her own well.

Out of the chill and the shadow, into the thrill and the shine. Out of the dearth and the famine, into the fulness divine.

When men's hearts are melted under the preaching of the word, or by sickness, or the loss of friends, believers should be very eager to stamp the truth upon the prepared mind. Such opportunities are to be seized with holy eagerness.

There may be different channels of approach, yes. For not all peoples walked in the field when the wheat was ripe. Neither did all stand at the tomb when Lazarus was called forth. Neither were they all present when He walked on the water, nor when He fed the five thousand, nor when He hung on the Cross. Yet each experience answered, and does answer to something within each individual soul-entity. For each soul is a corpuscle in the body of God.

Every uncomfortable feeling, every pain, every moment of stress & suffering is for your own self-realizatio n.