“Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.”
Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter
“I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable.”
People's Education interview (2007)
Context: I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It’s not the final thing, it’s the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite. At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better — can identify what their purposes were and realize better ways to achieve those purposes. That is the important thing in teaching students to write: not to be frozen in their first effort.
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M. H. Abrams19
American literary theorist 1912–2015Related quotes
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist
Paula Poundstone (1959) American comedian
About science education in the state of Kansas; quoted in [Randi, James, James Randi, November 11, 2006, http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-11/111706rampa.html#i7, "A Sure Test", Swift, James Randi Educational Foundation, 2006-11-18]
Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher
Source: We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor
It's a joke.
In a 1978 interview with John S. Friedman, published in The Paris Review 26 (Spring 1984); and in Elie Wiesel : Conversations (2002) edited by Robert Franciosi, p. 86
“What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.”
Dmitri Shostakovich book Testimony
Page 229
Testimony (1979)
Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)
