Literary Birthday – 11 April – Leo Rosten

Leo Rosten was born on 11 April 1908 and died on 19 February 1997.

Leo Rosten Quotes

1. Everyone, in some small, sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
2. The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.
3. The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.
4. Humour is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers. (The return of Hyman Kaplan)
5. People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.
6. A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved.
7. Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
8. Thinking is harder work than hard work.
9. I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. (The Many Worlds of Leo Rosten)
10. Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.
11. Extremists think ‘communication’ means agreeing with them. (Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time)
12. Words sing. They hurt. They teach. They sanctify. They were man’s first, immeasurable feat of magic. They liberated us from ignorance and our barbarous past. (The Many Worlds of Leo Rosten)
13. Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined. (Passions & Prejudices: Or, Some of My Best Friends are People)

Leo Rosten was a Polish-born American humourist in the fields of scriptwriting, story-writing, journalism, and Yiddish lexicography. He was also a political scientist interested especially in the relationship of politics and the media. His books included The Education of Hyman Kaplan and The Joys of Yiddish.

Source for quotes
Source for image: Arthur Rothstein, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leo_Rosten_1959.JPG

by Amanda Patterson

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