A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.
Interpretation
Writers should offer new perspectives rather than simply reflect society.
Stanislaw Lem emphasizes the role of a writer as a visionary or innovator rather than merely a chronicler of existing societal norms and values. By suggesting that writers avoid running around with a mirror, Lem advocates for the creation of original thoughts and ideas that challenge conventional wisdom and provoke new ways of thinking, ultimately contributing to societal advancement.
In practice
In a literary discussion at a writer's workshop to emphasize the importance of originality.
The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.
We didn't know each other well. I never had the time. Now I see that it doesn't make any difference. The ones who hurry and the ones who take their time all end up in the same place. Just don't have any regrets. No regrets.
Cripple God, who always desires more than he's able to have, and doesn't always realize this to begin with. Who has built clocks, but not the time that they measure. Has built systems or mechanisms that serve particular purposes, but they too have outgrown these purposes and betrayed them. And has created an infinity that, from being the measure of the power he was supposed to have, turned into the measure of his boundless failure.
We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.
As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
Why does man create? Is it man's purpose on earth to express himself, to bring form to thought, and to discover meaning in experience? Or is it just something to do when he's bored?
Sound has spoiled the most ancient of the world's arts, the art of pantomime, and has canceled out the great beauty that is silence.
The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
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