Julian Jaynes Quotes

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

I often pick up papers and books which have all kinds of pictures and marks in them, but I cannot understand them as a white person does. They have a way of communicating by the use of written symbols and figures; but before they could do that, they had to have an understanding among themselves. You are learning that, and I was very much pleased to hear you are reading.

I think storytelling is storytelling. It doesn't matter what format it's shot on.

One paire of eares drawes dry an hundred tongues.

You heard me. You ain't blind.

The most invigorating form of reading matter is, of course, a will.

Normally you can't hear you're own voice because you're talking over it.

As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

Unlike seeing, where one can look away, one cannot 'hear away' but must listen ... hearing implies already belonging together in such a manner that one is claimed by what is being said.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

He said to play louder. He can't hear you.

Reading is a creative activity. You have to visualize the characters, you have to hear what the voices sound like.

Hey, yummy leather guy? Can you hear me? (Amanda)

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

Anybody who can't hear the difference between a ball hitting wood and a ball hitting concrete must be blind.

For though there never was so much reading matter put before the public, there was never less actual 'reading' in the truest and highest sense of the term than there is at present.

When I am willing, all sound is available to me.

A broader reading of history shows that appeasement, no matter how it is labeled, never fulfills the hopes of the appeasers.

Some say I have a beautiful voice, some say I have not. It is a matter of opinion. All I can say, those who don't like it shouldn't come to hear me.