“Don't tell me how to write my novel. Don't tell me you've got a better ending for it. I have no time for that.”
Playboy interview (1996)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Ray Bradbury 401
American writer 1920–2012Related quotes
Good Enough
Song lyrics, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993)
“Don't tell me! Don't tell me!”
Reaction to news of father being shot quoted in Betty Shabazz, Surviving Malcolm X: A Journey of Strength from Wife to Widow to Heroine (2003) by Russell J. Rickford, p. 349
1960s
“I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.”
The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
Jace to Clary, pg. 324
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)
“I will never tell you how to vote. If I do, don't listen to me.”
Snopes.com found no record of Sanders saying those words. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bernie-sanders-told-supporters-hed-never-tell-them-how-to-vote/ May be derived from a statement during an MSNBC town hall in April 2016:
We are not a movement where I can snap my fingers and say to you or to anybody else what you should do, because you won't listen to me. You shouldn't. You'll make these decisions yourself.
Misattributed
“I don't say so, but my spade tells me so.”
B.B. Lal's reply to his critics (traditional Hindus). As related and quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2012). The argumentative Hindu. New Delhi : Aditya Prakashan. Chapter: Ayodhya’s three history debates.
In the 1970s, Prof. B.B. Lal's excavation campaign “Archaeology of the Ramayana sites” [Lal 2008:15-28] found a common material culture at Ayodhya, Chitrakuta and other Ramayana sites all datable to a common period. It earned him the wrath of an audience of traditional Hindu godmen, who tend to place the Ramayana events at a far greater time-depth.