“Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

Rex Stout, page 246
Invitation to Learning

1961, Inaugural Address
Context: If a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.
All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

Source: The Capture

(29 January 2005)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2005
Context: At some point, I stopped and made the following note to myself: I have never finished a story. I'm beginning to see that now. I don't think that there's ever a point where a story or novel is just exactly right. There are only finer and lesser degrees of refinement, and even those are probably subjective. You might think it's perfect for a time, but read it a year or five years later, and you'll see you were mistaken. There's always something I can make better, every time I read one of my stories. Usually there are dozens of somethings. And I once thought this wasn't true, that a story reached a certain point and beyond that point you were only changing things, making them different, not making them better. Indeed, I thought, beyond a point, you risk screwing it all up. I don't think that anymore. You risk screwing it all up right from the start, and no story is ever as perfect as it can be. Perfection is always one or two polishes away from the writer.

Lonely on the Mountain (1980); later quoted in A Trail of Memories : The Quotations Of Louis L'Amour (1988) by Angelique L'Amour

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

John on a story he wrote when he was in elementary school Nov. 26th: Writing Advice (And Notes on Surnameless Tiffany) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gf69J1Go98&feature=channel
YouTube

Volume 1: On Blue's Waters (1999), Ch. 1
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)