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[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
--
Dagens Nyheter interview with David Attwell (December 8, 2003)

 

J. M. Coetzee

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It is fashionable among my friends to disparage [Conrad]. It is even necessary. Living in a world of literary politics where one wrong opinion often proves fatal, one writes carefully.... It is agreed by most of the people I know that Conrad is a bad writer, just as it is agreed that T. S. Eliot is a good writer. And now he is dead and I wish to God they would have taken some great, acknowledged technician of a literary figure and left him to write his bad stories.

 

Joseph Conrad

 

When the titanic apparatus of the mass-order has been consolidated, the individual has to serve it, and must from time to time combine with his fellows in order to renovate it. If he wants to make his livelihood by intellectual activity, he will find it very difficult to do this except by satisfying the needs of the many. He must give currency to something that will please the crowd. They seek satisfaction in the pleasures of the table, eroticism, self-assertion; they find no joy in life if one of these gratifications be curtailed. They also desire some means of self-knowledge. They desire to be led in such as way that they can fancy themselves leaders. Without wishing to be free, they would fain be accounted free. One who would please their taste must produce what is really average and commonplace, though not frankly styled such; must glorify or at least justify something as universally human. Whatever is beyond their understanding is uncongenial to them.
One who would influence the masses must have recourse to the art of advertisement. The clamour of puffery is to-day requisite even for an intellectual movement. The days of quiet and unpretentious activity seem over and done with. You must keep yourself in the public eye, give lectures, make speeches, arouse a sensation. Yet the mass-apparatus lacks true greatness of representation, lacks solemnity.

 

Karl Jaspers

 

People ask, ‚"Do you say that you are God?‚" I say, ‚"No, I am not God. . . . . . . I don't want to be God.‚" But what I do want to be is a humble servant of God so that I can teach people this Knowledge, so that I can give people this gospel of peace, love and Truth. That' all I want to do. So all these lectures, all these speeches that I am giving are just for this purpose.

 

Maharaji (Prem Rawat)

 

A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame. I don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere, but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer. In my case, the only advantage to fame is that I have been able to give it a political use. Otherwise, it is quite uncomfortable. The problem is that you're famous for twenty-four hours a day, and you can't say, "Okay, I won't be famous until tomorrow," or press a button and say, "I won't be famous here or now."

 

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When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world.

 

Susie Bright