Yevgeny Zamyatin

1884–1937 · Russian author

Topics: creativity

• A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable.

  — Yevgeny Zamyatin

• Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates. Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates.

  — Yevgeny Zamyatin

• Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

  — Yevgeny Zamyatin

• The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity — but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a sixty-second minute.

  — Yevgeny Zamyatin

• What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons — horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?" This is what children ask. But then children are the boldest philosophers.

  — Yevgeny Zamyatin