“Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.”

— Ilana Mercer

“National Review Eunuchs,” http://rt.com/op-edge/paleolibertarian-column-ilana-mercer/national-review-john-derbyshire RT, April 13, 2012.
2010s, 2012

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profess…" by Ilana Mercer?

Ilana Mercer 288

South African writer

Related quotes

“You can't write. That's not writing. It's scribbling. Distasteful scribbling. Why can't you write properly?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Nagiko, to Jerome
The Pillow Book

“One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Was written in a slightly different way by Leo Longanesi in Italian, above form has been attributed to Kafka without evidence.
Misattributed
Source: One Idiot Is One Idiot. Two Idiots Are Two Idiots. Ten Thousand Idiots Are a Political Party, Quote Investigator, 2021-10-08 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/10/08/idiots/,

“Ramu is our youngest child. He does not know how to write. The only thing he knows is to scribble on the slate. When the slate is covered with lines, he asks me to look at what he has written. Writing for him is nothing but scribbling. If, with some luck, one of the lines turns out to be letter, it’s not his fault. w:Brahma}Brahma’s writing is no different. Unpredictability is its characteristic. Not even one ina thousand is good. If one turns out to be good it’s not my fault. My wife was convinced that all this was Vedanta. She did not pay any attention to it.”

Masti Venkatesha Iyengar (1891–1986) Indian writer

His narration at the end of his short story “Velurina Lakshamma” quoted here. [Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, Masti, http://books.google.com/books?id=e6VqgWouUmUC, 2004, Katha, 978-81-87649-50-2, 24]
Quote

“The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.”

John Green (1977) American author and vlogger

July 19: A Day in the Life of a Writer (Who Has No Friends) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXbGFyNXLwA
YouTube

“Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

“The thing about writing in America—and I just recently understood this—is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it’s the wrong thing. It’s not a profession. A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can’t do anything else, and then you have another job. I’m always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something. If you just sit there, and you’re a writer, you’re bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals. Writing is not a profession. It’s a calling. It’s almost holy…”

Jamaica Kincaid (1949) Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer

On her views of writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)

“Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.”

Evelyn Waugh book A Little Learning

First lines
A Little Learning (1964)

“The thing that I think very striking is that no one, or no one I can remember, ever writes of an execution with approval.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

The dominant note is always horror. Society, apparently, cannot get along without capital punishment—for there are some people whom it is simply not safe to leave alive—and yet there is no one, when the pinch comes, who feels it right to kill another human being in cold blood. I watched a man hanged once. There was no question that everybody concerned knew this to be a dreadful, unnatural action. I believe it is always the same—the whole jail, warders and prisoners alike, is upset when there is an execution. It is probably the fact that capital punishment is accepted as necessary, and yet instinctively felt to be wrong, that gives so many descriptions of executions their tragic atmosphere. They are mostly written by people who have actually watched an execution and feel it to be a terrible and only partly comprehensible experience which they want to record; whereas battle literature is largely written by people who have never heard a gun go off and think of a battle as a sort of football match in which nobody gets hurt.
"As I Please" column in The Tribune (3 November 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

Joe Haldeman (1943) American science fiction writer

“Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Ilana Mercer 288

Related quotes

Related topics