Quotes about writer (1935 quotes, page 8)

“Simply translating the act of the scientist is the first job of any science writer. Then, in my more grandiose moments, the other big job of a science writer is to see connections, to see the forest composed by all these trees. The act of being a scientist, by definition, the act of being a modern scientist requires you to really focus. You have to drill down. You have to spend years studying one brick, one synaptic protein, one kind of thing that turns on the amygdala, one very particular question.”

Jonah Lehrer (1981) American science writer

Chimeras of Experience: A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer (2009)

Question , Tree , Study , Science

“We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Ten Books," The Southern Review (Autumn 1935) [p. 8]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Age

“Since I was a child, I’ve used my imagination to escape from life. At the same time, my imagination has plagued me with both reality-based anxieties as well as anxieties based entirely in the imagination, such as the fear of Hell I was taught to have by the Catholic Church. Paired with a talent for literary composition, a talent that it took me over ten years to refine, I became a writer of horror stories. To my mind, writing is the most important form of human expression, not only artistic writing but also philosophical writing, critical writing, etc. Art as such, especially programmatic music such as operas, seems trivial to me by comparison, however much pleasure we may get from it. Writing is the most effective way to express and confront the full range of the realities of life. I can honestly say that the primary stature I attach to writing is not self-serving. I’ve been captivated to some degree by all forms of creativity and expression—the visual arts, film, design of any sort, and especially music. In college I veered from literature to music for a few years, which is the main reason it took me six years to get an undergraduate degree in liberal arts. I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember. Since my instrument is the guitar, I know every form and style in its history and have written the classical, acoustic, and electric forms of this instrument. I think because I have had such a love and understanding of music do I realize, to my grief, its limitations. Writing is less limited in the consolations it offers to those who have lost a great deal in their lives. And it continues to console until practically everything in a person’s life has been lost. Words and what they express have the best chance of returning the baneful stare of life.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Wonderbook Interview with Thomas Ligotti http://wonderbooknow.com/interviews/thomas-ligotti/

Love , Life , Pleasure , Fear

“All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Interview in The Paris Review, Issue #13 http://books.google.com/books?id=iZt6sBaHemQC&q="all+those+writers+who+write+about+their+childhood+gentle+god+if+i+wrote+about+mine+you+wouldn't+sit+in+the+same+room+with+me"&pg=PA8#v=onepage (Summer 1956)

God , Childhood

“The state is taking action against people who have peacefully demonstrated their ideas. They are writers—all they did is to express their minds through the Internet. So the pattern is very clear. The state tries to maintain stability by crushing any thought of making change. It could happen to me, because I did the same thing and in many cases I went much further and deeper. But I always think the government can learn from their mistakes—they should learn and understand; they should be just as intelligent as anyone else.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, I have to speak for people who are afraid, 2010

People , Intelligence , Idea , Understanding

“I am essentially a child at heart, and that's something that's never lost on me. It starts with the liberation of the writer's imagination. When you have that kind of really inspired material in your hands, if you can't enjoy it… there are some curmudgeonly people I guess who don't care for this stuff, but it's such a gas. It's so much fun.”

Bill Fagerbakke (1957) American actor

Bill Fagerbakke interview: SpongeBob, Starship Troopers, Statham http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/bill-fagerbakke/36493/bill-fagerbakke-interview-spongebob-starship-troopers-statham (August 8, 2015)

People , Imagination , Heart

“My life hadn’t fallen apart. I kept my jobs going, I had girlfriends, I had money, I had a house, I had a car, I had all those things. But I got Hepatitis C from injecting government morphine. I started injecting in 1982, but it took 25 years for the symptoms to show. That was a complete wake-up call. As soon as I found out, I quit everything, including my job in New York, and came to India to be a writer. I started working on the book, and lived very cleanly. I even quit drinking for nine years. It wasn’t easy to do. But just knowing that my time was limited was enough. Hepatitis C will eventually turn into liver cancer. Everybody is dying, by the way. The difference is that I know it, and you don’t. We live in that kind of world. And knowing it has focused me and made me do things that I would probably have put off for another ten years.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater

Life , Money , Books , World

“At the same time the Sultãn thought that though ‘Sultãn Sikandar had led several expeditions for conquering the fort of Gwãlior and the country attached to it but met with no success.’ Consequently he sent ‘Ãzam Humãyûn, the governor of Karã, with 300,000 horsemen and 300 elephants for the conquest of Gwãlior… After some time the royal army laid a mine, filled it with gunpowder, and set fire to it. He entered the fort and took possession of it after the wall of the fort was breached. He saw there a bull made of brass, which the Hindûs had worshipped for years. In keeping with a royal order, the bull was brought to Delhî and placed at the Baghdãd Gate. It was still there till the reign of Akbar. The writer of this history saw it himself.”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Ibrãhîm Lodî (AD 1517-1526) Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

History , Time , Success , Country

“Great writers arrive among us like new diseases – threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.”

Craig Raine (1944) Poet

The Independent on Sunday, November 18, 1990.

Disease

“The historical part of the work can scarcely be called new, but several of the circumstances, which are related, have escaped the notice of former writers on the history of the sciences.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

History , Science , Parting

“Yes, there is some truth to the accusation that I resented being bypassed for Groat in 1960. He had a good season but the records will show I contributed a lot more to winning the pennant. I think, too, that a lot of the writers were moved by their racial feelings. An MVP endorsement looks good in the record of a potential manager, and it'll be a long time before we have a colored manager; longer still before there will be a colored Puerto Rican manager. Anyway, it wasn't my 'imagination' hurting me when I complained, it really was my neck. […] And the doctor says the wrenching of my neck was caused by some unconscious adjustment I had been trying to make because of my back.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "All-Star Case of Roberto Clemente"
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>

Truth , Color , Feeling , Imagination

“The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act … of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet [by Howard Williams]; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity. … the moral progress of humanity — which is the foundation of every other kind of progress — is always slow; but … the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration. And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress, is expressed both in the words of the writers cited in the above-mentioned book and in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing metre and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger — viz., vegetarianism.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. X

Life , Books , Food , Animals

“Imagine, 24 pages of superhero adventures produced by the same writer and artist every month!! How did they do it?”

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

What? By being professional about it? But that's too much like work!
2008
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26500&PN=1&totPosts=7
Monthly comics and creator's ability to keep on schedule

Imagination

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

Life , Truth , Books , Education

“As a writer, I see myself more as a communicator. For me, writing is the best part of my career.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

"Billboard Magazine" (11 October 2003)
2007, 2008

Communication , Parting

“This is a film about — and also for — not only obsessed clerks in record stores, but the video store clerks who have seen all the movies, and the bookstore employees who have read all the books. Also for bartenders, waitresses, greengrocers in health food stores, kitchen slaves at vegetarian restaurants, the people at GNC who know all the herbs, writers for alternative weeklies, disc jockeys on college stations, salespeople in retro clothing shops, tattoo artists and those they tattoo, poets, artists, musicians, novelists, and the hip, the pierced and the lonely. They may not see themselves but they will recognize people they know.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review of http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/high-fidelity-2000 High Fidelity (31 March 2000)
Reviews, Four star reviews

People , Health , Books , Food

“A writer should always bravely face life, risking death and mutilation in order to dethrone an emperor.”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

The Republic of Wine (1992)

Life , Death

“The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond — imperceivable reality — is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Nature , Reality , Study

“At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Reading", p. 12
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective — when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right — has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Hello Out There (1941)

Personality

“The multitude of formulas (for living the Christian life with success) proposed by Christian writers, preacher, conference speakers, and televangelists simply confuse me. They have different ideas about how it is done, offering promises of fulfillment and joy based on three easy steps, four points of action, or the five smooth stones that David threw.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Life , Idea , Success , Joy

“In, but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Source: The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), p. 72.

Learning

“Mr. Soame Jenyns, a writer of verse and member of the Board of Trade… In twenty three very small pages he had disposed of the "Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies" in a manner highly satisfactory to himself and doubtless also to the average reading Briton, who understood constitutional questions best when they were "briefly considered," and when they were humorously expounded in pamphlets that could be had for sixpence…. The heart of the question was the proposition that there should be no taxation without representation; upon which principle it was necessary to observe only that many individuals in England, such as copyholders and leaseholders, and many communities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, were taxed in Parliament without being represented there. "… are they only Englishmen when they solicit protection, but not Englishmen when taxes are required to enable this country to protect them?" As for "liberty," the word had so many meanings, "having within a few years been used as a synonymous term for Blasphemy, Bawdy, Treason, Libels, Strong Beer, and Cyder," that Mr. Jenyns could not presume to say what it meant.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

Communication , Beer , Question , Strong

“I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people… that shadow land between self and reality.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Paris Review Interview (1998)

People , World , Thinking , Reality

“We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

"The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," http://www.bartleby.com/229/5004.html letter to the Philadelphia Press (20 July 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), part V: November Boughs

Learning

“Anyone who loves nature, as I do, cries out at the havoc being spread by humans, all over the globe. The pressures of city life can be appalling, as are the moral ambiguities that plague us, both at home and via yammering media. The temptation to seek uncomplicated certainty sends some rushing off to ashrams and crystal therapy, while many dive into the shelter of fundamentalism, and other folk yearn for better, “simpler” times. Certain popular writers urgently prescribe returning to ancient, nobler ways.
Ancient, nobler ways. It is a lovely image... and pretty much a lie. John Perlin, in his book A Forest Journey, tells how each prior culture, from tribal to pastoral to urban, wreaked calamities upon its own people and environment. I have been to Easter Island and seen the desert its native peoples wrought there. The greater harm we do today is due to our vast power and numbers, not something intrinsically vile about modern humankind.
Technology produces more food and comfort and lets fewer babies die. “Returning to older ways” would restore some balance all right, but entail a holocaust of untold proportion, followed by resumption of a kind of grinding misery never experienced by those who now wistfully toss off medieval fantasies and neolithic romances. A way of life that was nasty, brutish, and nearly always catastrophic for women.
That is not to say the pastoral image doesn’t offer hope. By extolling nature and a lifestyle closer to the Earth, some writers may be helping to create the very sort of wisdom they imagine to have existed in the past. Someday, truly idyllic pastoral cultures may be deliberately designed with the goal of providing placid and just happiness for all, while retaining enough technology to keep existence decent.
But to get there the path lies forward, not by diving into a dark, dank, miserable past. There is but one path to the gracious, ecologically sound, serene pastoralism sought by so many. That route passes, ironically, through successful consummation of this, our first and last chance, our scientific age.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 563)
Glory Season (1993)

Love , Life , Wisdom , Women

“Part of life has a public orientation, but part of it does not. He has a private self that looks inward, and he should be able to feel with some distinctness the difference between public and private roles. It strikes me that those eighteenth century individuals who wrote letters to the newspapers signed “Publius” or something like that, were giving expression to this difference. When the writer appeared before the public in the common interest, he was conscious of stepping outside of his private considerations and entering into another capacity, of assuming a posture. The rest of the time he was his own man, which his thoughts and feelings reserved for himself.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Individuality and Modernity,” Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: 1958), p. 72.

Life , Feeling , Appearance , Time

“Critics disagree about almost every quality of a writer’s work; and when some agree about a quality, they disagree about whether it is to be praised or blamed, nurtured or rooted out. After enough criticism the writer is covered with lipstick and bruises, and the two are surprisingly evenly distributed.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, p. 99
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

“Sir Walter Scott was the Luther of literature. He reformed and he regenerated. To say that he founded a new school is not saying the whole truth; for there is something narrow in the idea of a school, and his influence has been universal. Indeed, there is no such thing as a school in literature; each great writer is his own original, and "none but himself can be his parallel." We hear of the school of Dryden and of Pope, but where and what are their imitators? Parnassus is the very reverse of Mont Blanc. There the summit is gained by treading closely in the steps of the guides; but in the first, the height is only to be reached by a pathway of our own. The influence of a genius like Scott's is shown by the fresh and new spirit he pours into literature.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Truth , School , Literature , Idea

“Actually, when you have been in the country for a long time… whether it’s an Indian kid going to live in California working in a software company or whether its me coming to live here as historian and writer; to a certain extent you become a part of the country, and to a certain extent you remain always the person you were with the set of circumstances, history or personal history. So, I don’t think I can ever totally become Indian, but after twenty years I have certainly taken many of the Indian elements. In fact I am sitting talking to you right now in my cotton pajamas and at lunch time I will probably have dal and rice. In various ways I have taken on the life of Delhi; I think I am in the lucky position, in that I can talk to both worlds.”

William Dalrymple (1965) author and historian

In Amrita Ghosh, "Author in Focus: An Interview with Dalrymple".

Life , World , Way , History

“After September 11, then, writers faced quantitative change, but not qualitative change. In the following days and weeks, the voices coming from their rooms were very quiet; still, they were individual voices, and playfully rational, all espousing the ideology of no ideology. They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear. "Desolate": "giving an impression of bleak and dismal emptiness… from L. desolat-, desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'."”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

Change

“The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’).”

Antony Flew (1923–2010) British analytic and evidentialist philosopher

Flew's review of The God Delusion

God , Books

“It is true that in recent years a number of attractive histories of mathematics have been published in England and America, but these have only dealt with Greek mathematics as part of the larger subject, and in consequence the writers have been precluded… from presenting the work of the Greeks in suflicient detail. The same remark applies to the German histories of mathematics, even to the great work of Moritz Cantor…”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface p. vi
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

History , Mathematics , Parting

“It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Evaristo Carriego: A Book About Old-Time Buenos Aires

Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 3

Books , Art , Parting

“I… subjoin references to those parts of the work for which I have not been indebted to my knowledge of what has been written before me: much of what is cited is probably not new, indeed it is dangerous for any one at the present day to claim anything as belonging to himself; several things which I once thought to have entered in this list have been since found (either by myself, or by a friend to whom I referred it) in preceding writers.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Preface, p. v
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Knowledge , Parting

“A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.”

Daniel Handler book The Vile Village

Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village (2001)

People , Horse

“A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Without Dogma

Leon Ploszowski in his first entry in his diary, "Rome, 9 January"
Without Dogma (1891)

Faith , Future , Sincerity

“I had no natural gift to be anything — not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, a painter of garden porches — not anything. So I've worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in The Daily News (1991-06-10)

Nature

“Asimov: I don't know of any science fiction writer who really attempts to be a prophet. Such authors accomplish their tasks not by being correct in their predictions, necessarily, but merely by hammering home—in story after story—the notion that life is going to be different.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life , Home , Science

“The Plankton character was only supposed to be in one or two episodes, but I was a writer on the show and I really liked this character. Stephen told me to come up with more ideas for Plankton. I’m not just his voice. I get to create how the character is written and how he evolves over time. You very rarely get that experience.”

Mr. Lawrence (1969) American voice actor, comedian, writer, storyboard artist, animator and director

Idea , Time

“A few first rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half-finished. The latter are no credit to their writers and a waste of time to their readers.”

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001) American mathematician and information theorist

IRE Transactions on Information Theory (1956), volume 2, issue 1, page 3. * The Bandwagon
Shannon
Claude E.
2
1
1956
March
10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.

Time

“The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.”

Barbara Walters (1929) American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality

Occasionally attributed to Walters; actually coined by Stan Barstow.
Misattributed

World

“Beautifully written… the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven… contains writing of which our best writers would be proud… there is not a singly ugly or dead sentence…' - or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences - unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as 'Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler' or 'Eric Pickford answered' or 'Pazzi worked like a man possessed' or 'Margot laughed in spite of herself' or 'Bob Sneed broke the silence.' What these commentators must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us to a dying fall: 'Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself…' 'It seemed forever ago…' 'He looked deep, deep into her eyes…' 'His dark eyes held her whole…' Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of Hannibal by Thomas Harris, p. 240
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Silence

“Photography is solitary work. There is emulation. It is interesting to know what other people do. Even so, writers do not read everything that is published. A painter does not look at everything. You have to choose. It’s reality, it’s life that is important. We shouldn’t be sniffing around each other all the time, looking….”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, The Main Thing Is Looking: Interview with Alain Desvergnes (1979), p. 75

Life , People , Reality , Time

“As to the word itself, it is generally allowed to be of Greek extraction. But whence the Greek word, enthousiasmos, is derived, none has yet been able to show. Some have endeavoured to derive it from en theoi, in God; because all enthusiasm has reference to him. … It is not improbable, that one reason why this uncouth word has been retained in so many languages was, because men were not better agreed concerning the meaning than concerning the derivation of it. They therefore adopted the Greek word, because they did not understand it: they did not translate it into their own tongues, because they knew not how to translate it; it having been always a word of a loose, uncertain sense, to which no determinate meaning was affixed.
It is not, therefore, at all surprising, that it is so variously taken at this day; different persons understanding it in different senses, quite inconsistent with each other. Some take it in a good sense, for a divine impulse or impression, superior to all the natural faculties, and suspending, for the time, either in whole or in part, both the reason and the outward senses. In this meaning of the word, both the Prophets of old, and the Apostles, were proper enthusiasts; being, at divers times, so filled with the Spirit, and so influenced by Him who dwelt in their hearts, that the exercise of their own reason, their senses, and all their natural faculties, being suspended, they were wholly actuated by the power of God, and “spake” only “as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”
Others take the word in an indifferent sense, such as is neither morally good nor evil: thus they speak of the enthusiasm of the poets; of Homer and Virgil in particular. And this a late eminent writer extends so far as to assert, there is no man excellent in his profession, whatsoever it be, who has not in his temper a strong tincture of enthusiasm. By enthusiasm these appear to understand, all uncommon vigour of thought, a peculiar fervour of spirit, a vivacity and strength not to be found in common men; elevating the soul to greater and higher things than cool reason could have attained.
But neither of these is the sense wherein the word “enthusiasm” is most usually understood. The generality of men, if no farther agreed, at least agree thus far concerning it, that it is something evil: and this is plainly the sentiment of all those who call the religion of the heart “enthusiasm.” Accordingly, I shall take it in the following pages, as an evil; a misfortune, if not a fault. As to the nature of enthusiasm, it is, undoubtedly a disorder of the mind; and such a disorder as greatly hinders the exercise of reason. Nay, sometimes it wholly sets it aside: it not only dims but shuts the eyes of the understanding. It may, therefore, well be accounted a species of madness; of madness rather than of folly: seeing a fool is properly one who draws wrong conclusions from right premisses; whereas a madman draws right conclusions, but from wrong premisses. And so does an enthusiast suppose his premisses true, and his conclusions would necessarily follow. But here lies his mistake: his premisses are false. He imagines himself to be what he is not: and therefore, setting out wrong, the farther he goes, the more he wanders out of the way.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Sermon 37 "The Nature of Enthusiasm"
Sermons on Several Occasions (1771)

Men , God , Religion , Fools

“If anyone can be considered the greatest writer who ever lived, it is Shakespeare.”

Isaac Asimov book Asimov's Chronology of the World

Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991), p. 226
General sources

“Like me, for instance, who can count so many years in my life when I completely lost all inclination to laugh, leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault, I for one need above all just to have a good laugh. I found that in Guy de Maupassant and there are others here, Rabelais among the old writers, Henri Rochefort among today's, where one can find that — Voltaire in 'Candide'. On the contrary, if one wants truth, life as it is, De Goncourt, for example, in 'Germinie Lacerteux', 'La fille Elisa', Zola in 'La joie de vivre' and 'L'assommoir' and so many other masterpieces paint life as we feel it ourselves and thus satisfy that need which we have, that people tell us the truth. The work of the French naturalists Zola, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, De Goncourt, Richepin, Daudet, Huysmans is magnificent and one can scarcely be said to belong to one's time if one isn't familiar with them.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote of Vincent, in his letter to sister Willemien van Gogh, from Paris, late October 1887; from letter 574 - original text on vangoghletters online http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let574/letter.html
1880s, 1887

Life , People , Truth , Guy

“Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem.”

John Braine (1922–1986) English novelist

New York Times, 7 October 1962.

“"This is now a matter of national security, sir."
"This is Franz Kafka, is what it is."
Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down.
"He's a Czech writer," Thomas Lull says. "He's been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony."
"Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue."”

Ian McDonald book River of Gods

Source: River of Gods (2006), Ch. 42 (p. 444).

Dead

“I'm really serious about this writing thing. What time I haven't been writing, I've been reading: Thomas Wolfe, if you know who he is. His writing is mostly built about the central character of a writer, himself. Altho it's fiction, it deals with his life and experiences. In my opinion, little as it's worth, he is the greatest writer that has lived, Shakespeare included. He is a genius.”

James Jones (1921–1977) American author

Letter to his brother Jeff, from Hawaii (7 April 1941); p. 11
To Reach Eternity (1989)

Life , Wolf , Time , Reading

“It is true that one of the first acts of tyrants is to erase history, to wipe out the recorded memory of a people. With that in mind, it's important to remember that the work that we do as writers, artists and performers will form an essential part of the collective memory that future generations will draw upon. And so we owe it to those future generations to defend that memory and be honest witnesses to our times.”

Rene Balcer (1954) screenwriter, producer and director

In a speech to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, 12/8/09: On the duties of artists.

People , History , Memory , Time

“Shove-groat, named also Slyp-groat, and Slide-thrift, are sports occasionally mentioned by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and probably were analogous to the modern pastime called Justice Jervis, or Jarvis, which is confined to common pot-houses, and only practiced by such as frequent the tap-rooms.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 302
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Obscure games

Justice , Sport , Housing

“Let us, rather, like the Greek writers, tear the tragedy to shreds.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

in Newman's essay of 1945, as quoted in: Abstract Expressionism, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London 1990, p. 20
1940 - 1950

Tear

“Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 96

“American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.”

Gore Vidal book Two Sisters

Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel http://books.google.com/books?id=xnJbAAAAMAAJ&q="American+writers+want+to+be+not+good+but+great+and+so+are+neither" (1970)
1970s

“Some of God's children, the "holy people", the writer among the number, though not associated with the "Miller movement", nor with the denomination subsequently organized, which calls itself the "Second Advent Church," have been looking at and "earnestly waiting" for Michael's Kingdom; and gladly we bear testimony to the "blessedness" of the wonderfully clear unfoldings of our Father's plan, at and since the fall of 1874 - the end of the 1335 days.
Words fail us to express this blessedness! Only those who have been refreshed in spirit with this new wine of the Kingdom could appreciate it, if we could describe it. It is therefore something to be felt, rather than told. It was at and since the ending of those 1335 prophetic, symbolic days that the previous views of the Lord's presence, and the fact that we are even now living in the time of the "harvest" of this Gospel age, and in the time of the setting up of our Michael's (Christ's) Kingdom, came to be known.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 88.

God , Children , People , Age

“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Quoted by Frederic Prokosch in Voices: A Memoir (1983)

“Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman “other” or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Against The Grain (1986), Ch. 13, The Revolt of the Reader

“The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

As quoted in "The Michener Phenomenon" by Caryn James in The New York Times (8 September 1985)

People , Imagination

“In [19]'46, I had started to awaken to the world. At first, the Russians nationalized everything [in East-Germany / DDR]. Rich people had their property taken away, and the people got access to their libraries, which was wonderful for me. I read Hermann Hesse. Thomas Mann was a little too heavy for me. But Lombroso, Nietzsche. Materialists, I would call them – writers who said there was no god, no spirit, that freedom is an illusion. That affected me deeply.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

God , People , World , Freedom

“The ideology of "competitive, atomistic can make a place for themselves only if they first create, via critiques, an awareness of the factors that alienate them. Many individual white women found in the women's movement a liberatory solution to personal dilemmas. Having directly benefited from the movement, they are less inclined to criticize it or to engage in rigorous examination of its structure than those who feel it has not had a revolutionary impact on their lives or the lives of masses of women in our society. Non-white women who feel affirmed within the current structure of feminist movement (even though they may form autonomous groups) seem to also feel that their definitions of the party line, whether on the issue of black feminism or on other issues, is the only legitimate discourse. Rather than encourage a diversity of voices, critical dialogue, and controversy, they, like some white women, seek to stifle dissent. As activists and writers whose work is widely known, they act as if they are best able to judge whether other women's voices should be heard.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Source: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 9.

Women , Feeling , Personality

“I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.”

Will Self (1961) English writer and journalist

The Guardian, May 9, 2007. http://books.guardian.co.uk/whyiwrite/story/0,,2075745,00.html#article_continue

Business , Solitude

“Of all the fighters today, I have to say that Mayweather reminds me most of me," Leonard told Irish boxing writer Brian Doogan in describing the incident. "The kid has every gift and physical attribute, but if he continues to be the kind of person he is, he'll never be one of us. He'll never make it.”

Sugar Ray Leonard (1956) American boxer

Sugar Ray Leonard on Floyd Mayweather, Jr. http://forums.doghouseboxing.com/index.php?showtopic=83714

Personality , Box

“Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Luna De Enfrente

"A Poem by Oscar Wilde" http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_wilde.html (1925) An essay on Wilde and his Ballad of Reading Gaol.

“A writer who does not write is nothing. One may as well be a fisherman who doesn't fish, a stripper who doesn't strip, or a beggar who doesn't beg.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

7 December 2004
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004

Fish

“Edvin is one of those persons who write to survive as writers and people; for them being a human and writer is the same thing.”

Edvin Kanka Cudic (1988) Human rights defender

Miloš Urošević, as quoted in May '92 (2012) p.19
About

People , Personality

“(On his Emmy nomination) I am humbled by the nomination. I got to work with a cast and writers made up of geniuses. The good news is I can finally realize my life long dream and buy my wife a solid gold speed boat.”

Will Arnett (1970) Canadian actor

"Stars React to Emmy Nominations," Access Hollywood (2006) http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah814.shtml
2006

Life , Dreams , Speed

“Two of my favourite current management writers are Americans – Clayton Christensen and Peter Senge. My all-time favourite gurus are Peter Drucker, who became a greatly admired friend, and W. Edwards Deming. The thing that set these people apart from many other business commentators is that they didn’t propose any all - encompassing theories, they simply told it like it is.
The fact is that life cannot be summarised as a simple set of rules; it’s far too complicated for that and it’s always changing. Unfortunately, all-encompassing panaceas do seem to be popular and certainly sell books, which is why I so value the objectivity of thought that each of these people brought to the debate.”

Robert Heller (1932–2012) British magician

Interview: Robert Heller (2006)

Life , People , Books , Business

“There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.”

Rex Stout (1886–1975) American writer

Rex Stout, on why he turned from writing serious fiction to detective stories
The New York Times, "An Interview with Mister Rex Stout"

Money

“Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him.
I remember we made each other laugh a lot. We laughed at the same things. We became friends. It was easy.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Good Omens: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book (2014)

“You can find out far more about a writer from his poems or fiction.. because in his stories or poems, his preoccupations, obsessions, moral standards, the quality of his intelligence, his loves, hates, aspirations, belief and fears.. insist on expression.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

Tiger and the Rose, 1971

Love , Hate , Fear , Intelligence

“I have discovered only two writers whom I can take all the way, or at least nearly so; and those are Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe. I think Hemingway is confused on lots of things, just as I think the Fountainhead was confused; but I also think both are magnificently right in many things.)”

James Jones (1921–1977) American author

Letter to Maxwell Perkins (21 October 1946); p. 77
To Reach Eternity (1989)

Way , Thinking , Wolf

“Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, "How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?" and avoid "How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?"”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)
Letters and interviews

Nature , Help

“I think he writes the truth. Because life is like that most of the time in some shape or form, whether it’s illness or the end of the world. Cormac’s a writer’s writer. You read his writing and think, I can do that, and then you sit down and try. And you try, dude.”

Ridley Scott (1937) English film director and film producer

On the relentlessly brutal tone of the works of screenwriter Cormac McCarthy
New York Times interview (2013)

Life , Truth , World , Thinking

“When I heard about the project, the name sounded kind of familiar. I felt like I'd seen it in the book review section or on a list somewhere, but I didn't really know what the story was. The two things that stood out immediately were Jenji Kohan, who I think is one of the best writers out there, and the other thing was Netflix.”

Jason Biggs (1978) American actor

On debut in show Orange Is the New Black, interviewed in: — [December 4, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/q-a-jason-biggs-changes-stripes-in-orange-is-the-new-black-20130710, Rolling Stone, Q&A: Jason Biggs Changes Stripes in 'Orange Is the New Black', July 10, 2013, James Sullivan]

Books , Thinking

““Late Shri. Cakyar, was not just a skilled exponent and a capable teacher of Kutiyattam, his wisdom and depth of knowledge made him worthy of the title "Acharya" ”
- Dr. Prem Lata Sharma (noted Hindi writer and scholar of Indian arts and literature), 1994”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya
Source: Nāṭyakalpadruma : Kerala kī Kūṭiyāṭṭam nāṭyakalā kī rūparekhā http://worldcat.org/oclc/44811805&referer=brief_results(Hindi translation), Mani Madhava Chakyar, Dr. Prem Lata Sharma (Ed), Sangeet Natak Akademi New Delhi, 1994

Wisdom , Art , Literature , Knowledge

“I would much rather sit, dimmed by inattention, and study the atmosphere and the silence and dance between people, but often times I’m not offered this privilege. The necessity for isolation, and the striving for attention is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On her role as an actress and a writer http://reelladies.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/reel-lady-masiela-lusha/

People , Study , Silence , Time

“Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.”

Claud Cockburn (1904–1981) Irish journalist

Pages 224-5
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

Death , People , Sadness , Personality

“When, as a result of what was called Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the priests had in fact almost entirely lost this function of guidance. Their place was taken by writers and scientists. In both cases it is equally absurd. Mathematics, physics, and biology are as remote from spiritual guidance as the art of arranging words. When that function is usurped by literature and science it proves there is no longer any spiritual life.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“Morality and literature,” pp. 164-165
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Life , Art , Literature , Mathematics

“Patrick’s a very prolific writer. He’s a one-of-a-kind kind of guy. You’ve got to let him do his thing. You don’t want to get too up in his grill, sort of speak.”

Joe Trohman (1984) American musician

My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (2004), Ultimate Guitar Interview (2008)

Guy

“The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and, later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

History , Boy , Question , Teachers

“If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Writers on Writing interview (1986)

Knowledge

“In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.”

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore

The Vagrants of Wicklow, written 1901-1902, first published in The Shanachie (Dublin, autumn 1906).

Family , Sense

“He stared at me. “You barely know how to read and you have decided to become a great writer?” he said to me in a voice full of shock and arrogance. I’d finally had enough of him. “Yes!” I bellowed, going into my wrestling stance. “I don’t know how to read, and I’ve decided to become a great writer—WHAT OF IT?””

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Reading

“Poverty and inequality like this should cause Europeans to cringe in horror, especially since (we have it on good authority) there is no safety net in America, no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no assistance for the destitute--not the slightest bit of social solidarity. In the U. S. "only the most fortunate have the right to medical care and to grow old with dignity," as one writer recently put it in Libération. University courses are reserved only for those who can pay, which partly explains the "low level of education" in the benighted US.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

Education , Universe

“But much more vicious than these cases is the majority of foreign correspondents who never have to be placed against the wall, who are never told what to write and how to write it, but who know from contact with the great minds of the press lords or from the simple deduction that the bosses are in big business and the news must be slanted accordingly, or from the general intangible atmosphere which prevails everywhere, what they can do and what they must never do. The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, "I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like."”

George Seldes (1890–1995) American journalist

Lords of the Press

Stupidity , History , Business

“Gibbs is thankful to be alive. He really thought life was over, and for him to admit that is huge, because he’s not that kind of guy. After all this time, the writers still find new places to take him. NCIS was never a show about the crime cases, because sometimes we solve ’em, sometimes we don’t. This is a show about characters. The audience takes real ownership of the people we play.”

Mark Harmon (1951) actor from the United States

TV Insider interview (2017)

Life , People , Guy , Time

“A work of genius is a complex object and there is light to be shed about what went into the making of it. Even in the case of scientific and mathematical achievement we can say a great deal about the existing state of knowledge, the problems it failed to address, why those problems were or had become interesting, the particular capacities which the solver brought to their solution. At the other extreme is a work of art which seems to have much more immediate roots in the personal life of the artist or writer. In between is the area in which Keynes worked, which was partly scientific, partly artistic. This gives a wide justification for a biographical approach. As I put it in the introduction to my first volume: 'If underlying Keynesian theory was Keynes's vision of his age, knowledge of his state of mind and the circumstances which formed it is essential, not only in order to understand how he came to see the world as he did, but also in order to pass judgement on the theory itself.”

Robert Skidelsky (1939) Economist and author

John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (2003), Introduction

Life , Age , World , Art

“People talk about talent as though it were some neutral substance that can be applied to anything. But talent is narrow and only functions with a very few subjects, which it is up to the writer to find.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"Howe's Complaint" (1973), p. 15
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

People

“A very eminent writer has observed, that "the conversion of the Gentile world, whether we consider the difficulties attending it, the opposition made to it, the wonderful work wrought to accomplish it, or the happy effects and consequences of it, may be considered as a more illustrious evidence of God's power, than even our Saviour's miracles of casting out devils, healing the sick, and raising the dead." Indeed, a miracle said to have been wrought without any attending circumstances to justify such an exertion of divine power, could not easily be rendered credible; and our author's argument proves no more. If it were related, that about 1700 years ago, a man was raised from the dead, without its answering any other end than that of restoring him to life, Iconfess that no degree of evidence could induce me tobelieve it; but if the moral government of God appeared in that event, and there were circumstances attending it which could not be accounted for by any human means, the fact becomes credible. When two extraordinary events are thus connected, the proof of one established the truth of the other. Our author has reasoned upon the fact as standing alone, in which case it would not be easy to disprove some of his reasoning; but the fact should be considered in a moral view - as connected with the establishment of a pure religion, and it then becomes credible. In the proof of any circumstance, we must consider every principle which tends to establish it; whereas our author, by considering the case of a man said to have been raised from the dead, simpli in a physical point of view, without any reference to a moral end, endavours to show that it cannot be rendered credible; and, from such principles, we may admit his conclusions without affecting the credibility of Christianity. The general principle on which he establishes his argument, is not the great foundation upon which the evidence of Christianity rests. He says, "Notestimony can be sufficient to establish a miracle, unless it be of such a kind, that the falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endavours to prove." Now this reasoning, at furthest, can only be admitted in those cases where the fact has nothing but testimony to establish it. But the proofs of Christianity do not rest simply upon the testimony of its first promulgators, and that of those who were affterwards the instruments of communicating it; but they rest principally upon the acknowledged and very extraordinary affects which were produced by the preaching of a few unlearned, obscure persons, who taught "Christ crucified;" and it is upon these indisuptable matters of ffact which we reason; and when the effects are totally unaccountable upon any principle which we can collect from the operation of human means, we must either admit miracles, or admit an effect without an adequate cause. Also, when the proof of any position depends upon arguments drawn from various sources, all concutring to establish its turh, to select some one circumstance, and atrempt to show that that alone is not sufficient to render the fact credible, and thence infer that it is not ture, is a conclusion not to be admitted. But it is thus that our author has endavoured to destroy the credibiliry of Christianity, the evidences of which depend upon a great variety of circumstances and facts which are indisputably true, all cooperating to confirm its truth; but an examination of these falls not whithin the plan here proposed. He rests all his arguments upon the extraordinary nature of the fact, considered alone by itself; for a common fact, with the same evidence, would immediately be admitted. I have endavoured to show, that the extraordinary nature, as much as the mosst common events are necessary to fulfill the usual dispensations of Providence, and therefore the Deity was then direted by the same motive as in a more ordinary case, that of affording us such assitance as our moral condition renders necessary. In the establishment of a pur religion, the proof of its divine origin may require some very extraordinary circumstances which may never afterwards be requisite, and accordingly we find that they have not happened. Here is therefore a perfect concistencty in the operation of the Deity, in his moral government, and not a violation of the laws of nature: Secondly, the fact is immediately connected with others which are indisputably true, and which, without the supossition of the truth of that fact, would be, at least, equally miraculous. Thus I conceive the reasoning of our author to be totally inconclusive; and the argumentss which have been employed to prove the fallacy of his conclusions, appear at the same time, fully to justify our belief in, and prove the moral certainty of, our holy religion.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 27; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA262," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 262-263

Life , God , Truth , World

“The prose writer drags meaning along with a rope, the poet makes it stand out and hit you.”

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

Speculations (Essays, 1924)

“As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

As quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)

Beauty , Happiness

“Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I’ve said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing.
And without those three writers, I would not be here today. And nor, of course, would any of you. I thank you.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

"Mythcon 35 Guest of Honor Speech", in Mythprint (October 2004)

Life , People , Truth , Age

“Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world. They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin. Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil. Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things…. Catholicism is also intrinsically communal, a notion that goes far beyond sitting at Mass with the local congregation, extending to a mystical sense of continuity between the living and the dead. Finally, there is a habit of spiritual self-scrutiny and moral examination of conscience”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

World , Communication , Nature , Sense

“…you could pick any two writers of equal skill, have them read each other's work, and they would both instantly proclaim each other the champion. Unless one of them happens to be Stephen King, because he's a jerk.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

God Ran Out of Faces
Fully Ramblomatic, Reviews

God , Jerk , Reading

“I had it for about fifteen years until I read Lenin and other writers, who showed me what was wrong with our society and how to cure it… Since then I have needed no magnesia.”

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) Geneticist and evolutionary biologist

On being cured of his gastritis, as quoted in TIME magazine (24 June 1940) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,764097,00.html

Reading

“All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.”

Ernest J. Gaines (1933–2019) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

In an interview with Religion & Ethics Newsweekly http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/02/18/february-18-2011-ernest-gaines/8169/, February 18, 2011

Past