After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
Interpretation
As we grow older and our lives become more engaging, the need to create narratives for ourselves lessens.
Gore Vidal suggests that during our formative years, storytelling is a vital tool for understanding and interpreting our experiences. However, as we mature and our lives unfold in more captivating ways, the necessity to fabricate narratives about ourselves wanes, as reality becomes rich and interesting enough to live without embellishment.
In practice
In a motivational speech about growing up.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
After months of want and hunger, we suddenly found ourselves able to have meals fit for the gods, and with appetites the gods might have envied.
The beauty of life is in people who feel some obligation to enhance life. Without that, we're only half alive.
It's easy to discount water's importance in the kitchen. After all, it has no flavor, and more often than not, it's left off ingredient lists, making it seem like an afterthought. Yet water is an essential element of almost everything we cook and eat, and it affects the flavor and texture of all our food.
I think it's my adventure, my trip, my journey, and I guess my attitude is, let the chips fall where they may.
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