Lee Siegel Quotes

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

I've never really thought of my real life - you know, the one I wake up to and fall asleep to at night - as being a pop star's life.

As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.

You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.

My everyday life in which I do exactly the same things as everyone else should not inspire people, and yet I am constantly congratulated by strangers for simply existing.

I think the ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar.

I'm just an average woman with average concerns.

What a day-to-day affair life is.

I've never lived the glamorous life.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am.

But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.

The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments.

the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.

I don't dream a lot. But whenever I dream, I just dream about the day I just had or something like that. Mostly that's what I dream about. I dream about that current day. Other than that, I don't dream a lot.

I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.

I have no story. My story goes from day to day.

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That's why I love coffee shops and public places - I mean, they're all out there.

You can't make a good show based on pure verisimilitude, pure anti-drama. But you have to acknowledge a lot of ordinary life. Most TV doesn't do that.

A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen-and then in bed, of course.

...the great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.

The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.