Walter Brueggemann Quotes

Writing has always been an incredible outlet for me to feel like I have a voice, even when sometimes I was the only one reading my work. It has been a way for me to unlock my imagination. That's when the world becomes yours, after all.

Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman. The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.

Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. . . . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.

There's a lack of creativity in every field because people are afraid. As an artist in this world we can do whatever we want

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.

I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

The best thing to do is dive with your imagination ~ you can never drown yourself.

Being liberated means reading what you want to read, and fantasizing about what you want to fantasize about.

I never cared so much about making perfect sense. I wanted to make perfect nonsense.

The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

It's how you tell the story that makes it new. That's what artists do. They let us look at the world from a different perspective. They let us look at birds in a way that makes us never see birds again in the same way. That's why I don't think computers are healthy for kids. They're too literal. You pop a button and a bluebird comes out. You pop another button and you can take the color blue and shove it into the outline of the bluebird.

It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, 'Suppertime!'

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

I'm an artist and you can fantasize about me however you want.

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.

I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and I get ideas, I hear the wind, and I'm off into the darkness somewhere.

That's the artist's job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things.

An artist must smash down the systems that domesticate the mind.

The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.