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The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

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
Build
Purpose
Art
Life
Organize
Reflect

More quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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Literature is painting, architecture, and music.
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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.
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The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.
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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The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The world is kept alive only by heretics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Explosions are not comfortable.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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At night numbers must sleep it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this once in a thousand years has come today.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see?
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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And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
Yevgeny Zamyatin