Quote

A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

Arthur Koestler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Arthur Koestler
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: September 5
Died: 1983
Died: March 1
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Buda Pest
Kösztler Artúr
Ten
Ambition
Trade
Reader
Hundred
Writer
Years
Readers
Time
Contemporary

More quotes by Arthur Koestler

Image
The cell door slammed behind Rubishov.
Arthur Koestler
Image
The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations.
Arthur Koestler
Image
Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.
Arthur Koestler
Image
Brain-washing starts in the cradle.
Arthur Koestler
Image
I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.
Arthur Koestler
Image
When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.
Arthur Koestler
Image
One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.
Arthur Koestler
Image
To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.
Arthur Koestler
Image
When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived
Arthur Koestler
Image
No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.
Arthur Koestler
Image
When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.
Arthur Koestler
Image
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
Arthur Koestler
Image
One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
Arthur Koestler
Image
...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.
Arthur Koestler
Image
The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.
Arthur Koestler
Image
The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.
Arthur Koestler
Image
The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.
Arthur Koestler
Image
The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream - the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.
Arthur Koestler
Image
If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.
Arthur Koestler
Image
The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.
Arthur Koestler