All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
T. E. LawrenceRead
Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creativity often stems from negative emotions rather than positive ones.
T. E. Lawrence suggests that the most profound and impactful literature arises from feelings of misery, anger, and discomfort. In contrast, he posits that contentment lacks the depth and emotional resonance necessary to fuel genuine creative expression, highlighting a common belief that struggle can lead to greater artistic achievements.
Themes
LiteratureEmotionsCreativityStruggleAngst
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be referenced in a literary discussion about the motivations behind famous works of art.
More from T. E. Lawrence
All quotes βIn peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade.... The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance.
T. E. LawrenceRead
The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.
T. E. LawrenceRead
Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.
T. E. LawrenceRead
We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.
T. E. LawrenceRead
When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.
T. E. LawrenceRead
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