
"How to Get Things Done", Chips off the old Benchley (1949)
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"How to Get Things Done", Chips off the old Benchley (1949)
“It never ceases to amaze me how often I ask people, “What do you really want?”
and they look at me blankly, unable to articulate the answer. It’s not that they don’t want things, it’s just that they don’t have a high level of clarity regarding the matter.”
Popular Quotes, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Journal Articles
Source: The Paris Review (Issue 90, Winter 1983)
On looking to the next generation for hope in “Author Angie Thomas: Burn It All Down Or Use Those Emotions In My Art” https://www.ttbook.org/interview/author-angie-thomas-burn-it-all-down-or-use-those-emotions-my-art in To the Best of Our Knowledge (2019 Jan 14)
The Superstition of Divorce (1920)
Context: I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly discover in the end.
(5 August 2007)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007
Context: It has been my experience that many people actually believe that writers live in a state of perpetual inspiration. Maybe this is the source of that annoying "Where do you get your ideas from?" question. Maybe the people who believe writers live in a state of perpetual inspiration are the same people who ask that question, thinking — wrongly — that there's a trick of some sort involved. And if a writer would but tell them the trick, then they too would have access to the bottomless well of ideas and live in a state of perpetual inspiration. In my case, at least, there is no bottomless fucking well of ideas, and if I only wrote when I truly felt inspired, I'd starve and live in a cardboard box at the corner of Crack and Whore (which is to say, the corner of Ponce and Piedmont). But, that said, there does have to be a spark. What people ought to be asking me is "Where do you get those tiny, little infinitesimally faint sparks that you then somehow manage to blow up into ideas?" Of course, my answer would be, "I have no inkling whatsoever."