Amazingkae is quite busy reading, writing, and...
“The main purpose of life is: To have a job in whose purpose you can believe; To have friends whose immediate purposes you can trust; To have some spot on earth to which you can return as home; To be at the same time a citizen of a larger world.”
- James A. Michener
To research, reflect, create and write as Michener must require the patience of Job. If I only in my lifetime created one tenth of all his first chapter notes, I would have one of the world’s best writing portfolios. I need to keep his picture on a wall where I can see it; perhaps some of his skill and tenacity will channel through by osmosis. Here are some more of his quotes, properly kidnapped tonight from Wikepedia:
“I am right now in the middle of a difficult writing project. And it’s just as difficult now as when I started. But when I get up in the morning I am really qualified to say, ‘Well, Jim, it isn’t going too well, but there is nobody on the block who is better able to wrestle with it than you are, so lets get on with it.”
“I think young people ought to seek that experience that is going to knock them off center.”
“I had been educated with free scholarships. I went to nine different universities, always at public expense, and when you have that experience, you are almost obligated to give it back. It’s as simple as that.”
“I decided (after listening to a “talk radio” commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life that) I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perceptual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation.”
—Interview, Parade magazine, November 24, 1991.
