Walter Kaufmann Quotes

Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.

The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it.

The more I see of the world, the more am i dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief of the inconsistencies of all human.

Even the hubris or the desire to go out into the world and find patterns that reflect back to yourself is so Lacanian and, like, mirrored, so as to be ridiculous. But there are very fixed sets of expectations that the world has about this work.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.

I remember going to see Amiri Baraka. It wasn't actually too long before he died. He said, "You've got to write to change the world!" I was like, "Not me, no, no, no, no."

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

You will find the whole world will change to you when you change your attitude toward it.

The World is perfect as it is, including my desire to change it

[James] Baldwin was a revelation for me, the kind of revelation that follows you all your life because you can go back to it. It's not just about stories. It's about philosophy. It's about criticizing the world. It's about deconstructing the world around you.

Scanning the newspapers and absorbing with a mixture of incredulity and indignation the enormities they report, I conclude that what England lacks today is, quite simply, sense.

There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name.

My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.

I want to make films about the human condition, what we're doing to the world or ourselves.

As you know, the best way to solve a problem is to identify the core belief that causes the problem; then mock that belief until the people who hold it insist that you heard them wrong.

I don't want to write my life. I live my life. I want to make up a new world.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.

There are only three things in the world, one is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.