Skip to content

He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation?

— Stanisław Lem

Another quote →

Topics

Writing

More quotes by Stanisław Lem

If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.

Solaris (1961)

Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way.

Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.

Solaris (1961)

Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.

His Master's Voice (1968)

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

Solaris (1961)

All Stanisław Lem quotes →

You may also like

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”

Suman Pokhrel

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Robert Benchley

Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.

William Wordsworth Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Stanisław Lem (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.