Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers
“Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.”
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
“The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.”
L'on voit bien que l'Opéra est l'ébauche d'un grand spectacle; il en donne l'idée.
Aphorism 47
Les Caractères (1688), Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit
“Everybody talks, but there is no conversation.”
“Stories,” p. 60
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Stone and a Word”
“The first payback that i would accomplish: i'd draft children from the senate and congress”
Payback
Albums, The 3rd World (2008)
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Context: It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
“I admire you, but in the end everybody talks.”
To Lise Lesevre during interrogation, from the Saturday, March 23, 1987 issue of "The Philadelphia Inquirer"
Letter to Bruce Rogers (20 August 1931)
