It seems that a lot of writers copy ideas from others, but has there ever been anyone who became a famous writer or wrote something good despite admittedly not being much of a reader themselves and having very few literary influences?
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Nietzsche didn't read, apart from le Greeks
He really wrote Zarathustra without reading Goethe? That’s pretty fascinating actually.
Given that Nietzsche called Conversations with Eckermann 'the best German book' it's safe to assume he read it, and subsequently Goethe. No one becomes a professor at 23 without having read a shit-ton, btw
You're wrong. After his youth years (around his 30s) he literally stopped reading to be himself. He says this quite explicitly in his posthumous notebooks. He was tired of literature, tired of reading the opinions of people he disagreed with. Not much different from Schopenhauer, after all. He also didn't read that much. You should stop fetishizing the cumulative act of reading, as well as the knowledge of big authors. It doesn't take infinite knowledge to write a great book.
Also, hate to break it to you, but almost all the Romantic authors, with the exception of Leopardi, also used to read very little.
Perhaps once they become practicing writers, idiot. As in the case of Nietzsche. 'Not reading' does not equal 'not having read,' however. Nietzsche's 'not having read' Spinoza and Stirner also behoves his 'philosophy,' in so many ways..
Hate to break it to you but many of the Romantic Writers were also critics and translators (Byron and Shelley) and Keats' Upon Looking Into Chapman's Homer is pretty much a paean to reading.
You're the fantasist: fantasizing the getting of something for nothing-- which, along with the Romantic notion of 'original genius,' is absolute crap.
To be fair, the Aztecs descended from a bunch of knuckle-dragging mammoth hunters but came up with some amazing artistic and architectural feats on par with Greece and Rome with original genius, completely isolated from
the rest of world civilization.
homie, Neanderthals were already capable of artistic feats. Quote any Aztec writing that's worth its money (or I guess sacraficial baby blood)
We can’t because all the codexes were destroyed, but we can assume some of it was similar to the Mayans who excelled in math and had works like the Popol Vuh.
Christcuck invaders chimped tf out and burned all the aztec books with one exception, and that sole surviving book is worth dogshit.
>pagarape babies got christ cucked
thank you for confirming this again
>Neanderthals were already capable of artistic feats
Actually, no. European civilization would not even have been possible if they weren't contiguous to the Mediterranean and West Asia where they learned everything they knew.
The meso-americans had to learn everything from scratch and their writing was probably quite good except that not much of it survived. The spaniards did not exactly prioritize the preservation of anything that was there before them.
Shut the frick up ameritard
Nietzsche read Dya-Na-Sore. Maybe you're confusing it because Nietzsche didn't read - while writing on a book himself. In between he read.
Do you have any idea how impossible it would be for someone to be literate, which is a pre-requisite for writing, and yet have never read anything? You need to read to even become literate in the first place.
But we all know what you mean. You want to know if there are writers who aren’t “readers” and the answer is yes but there are very few.
I must disagree with this. Not only would this be writing in 'bad faith,' but comparable to a musician who didn't listen to music, or a painter who never looked at (much less studied!) other paintings. Imperfect readers, lovers of music and painting, certainly exist, but they're called (at best) amateurs, if they even practice.
The only sphere where this could be warranted is travel literature, or the writings of those who experienced something extraordinary. In modern times great athletes and music stars (etc.) who are not readers per se employ writers who are in order to get their stories out, etc.
I never said it was warranted. If anything, it’s very unwarranted.
OTOH while writing what writer reads? Zero. But of course this merely reduces the question to a semantic trick
No. And it's the authors who don't read that the most derivative and cliche. They all write the same way and use the same tired cliches, mostly from movies.
Interesting question but probably difficult to answer as it's generally not well known how much a historical person might have read. Like, do we know how much of a reader Shakespeare was?
Homer according to descriptions passed down of him.