Literary Birthday – 12 September – Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Lem was born on 12 September 1921 and died on 27 March 2006.

Stanisław Lem Quotes

1. Good books tell the truth, even when they’re about things that never have been and never will be. They’re truthful in a different way.
2. Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
3. I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone’s wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.
4. 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.
5. I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.
6. I hadn’t known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. The first requisite for immortality is death.

Stanisław Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire. He wrote novels, short stories, and essays on subjects ranging from philosophy and futurology to literary criticism. His books have sold more than 45 million copies. Lem is best known for Solaris, a philosophical science fiction novel that has been adapted into a feature film three times. He also wrote The Man from Mars, his first novel, which introduced themes that would recur throughout his work. One of Lem’s central themes was the difficulty, and sometimes impossibility, of communication between humans and profoundly alien beings. He also explored the limitations of human intelligence and the shortcomings of human nature. His work often used science fiction and satire to question what humans can truly understand about themselves and the world. In 1973, Lem was awarded honorary membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA).

Image: Courtesy of Lem’s secretary, Wojciech Zemek. Resize and digital processing by Masur., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Lem_resize.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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