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The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

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Yevgeny Zamyatin
Age: 53 †
Born: 1884
Born: January 1
Died: 1937
Died: January 1
Author
Engineer
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Prosaist
Satirist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin
Eugene Zamyatin
Art
Form
Way
Destroying
Effective
Philosophy
Given

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To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.
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The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.
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They do not need the sun. Who needs the sun when the eyes glow? Darkness. A woolen fog has wrapped the earth, has dropped a heavy curtain. From far away, from beyond the curtain, comes the sound of drops falling on stone. Far, far away - the autumn, people, tomorrow. (The North)
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what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about
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Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.
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Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment with an excellent toilet and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless Why? and What next?.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.... But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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All women are lips, nothing but lips.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin