Justin Lancy

It is one of the great themes for a writer: what one culture wants from another.

We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent de Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so that the poor “will forgive you the bread you give them.”

do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.

To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium. And if, as Napoleon wrote to Carnot, “the art of government is not to let men go stale,” then it is essentially an art of unbalancing.

A creative organizer creates an organization that can function well without him. When a genuine leader has done his work, his followers will say, “We have done it ourselves,” and feel that they can do great things without great leaders. With the noncreative it is the other way around: in whatever they do they arrange things so that they themselves

As the world gets more confused, storytellers should become more centred. What we need in our age are not more specialists, experts, spin-doctors. What we need are people deeply rooted in the traditions of their art, but who are also at ease in the contemporary world.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is

So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.

Marcel Duchamp said, “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.”