Volume depends precisely on ...

Volume depends precisely on the writer\'s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

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Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
 William Tecumseh Sherman
I'm pretty conservative when it comes to money. My parents were very working class and constantly working. There was always a very strong work ethic and that's put a more conservative, "save for a rainy day" mentality into me.
The kind of group mentality that we had lived under since the Second World War is starting to erupt, and the craving for individualism is now much stronger. It's not as taboo anymore, as it was when I was younger.
 Nicolas Winding Refn
The overall similarity is probably in the mentality of law enforcement officers. There's a sense of wanting to really uphold a sense of morality and make sure that the laws are enforced to the letter, whenever possible.
 Benjamin McKenzie
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

Quotes from the same author

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.
All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.