Quotes about writing
page 17

“I have been so puzzled over the early labelling of personal construct theory as ‘cognitive’ that several years ago I set out to write another short book to make it clear that I wanted no part of cognitive theory.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

George A. Kelly. The Psychotherapeutic Relationship. 1965. p. 216

Books, Parting

“All the sciences came to exist in Arabic. The systematic works on them were written in Arabic writing.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, p. 432, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Muqaddimah (1377)

Science

“To write his views or his observations, his ideas, but not his judgments. Our judgments limit our views of things. Some enclosures, but no walls. The man who always write his judgments places before his eyes the calpe and abyla. He goes no further and creates a nec plus ultra. Thus, in the study of wisdom, many views and few judgments.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Wisdom, Idea, Study

“Francis Fukuyama seized on the ignominious collapse of the Soviet system as proof that “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” and Marxism’s “death as a living ideology of world historical significance.” That conclusion was, to say the least, premature, not only because it reckoned without the rise of an Islamist theocracy or the fallout from the 2008 worldwide recession, which provoked a renascence of Marxist advocacy in the writings of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, the Occupy Movement, and Thomas Picketty. This pattern is, again, an echo of what happened in Reconstruction, and it warns those who yet believe that liberal democracy is the most desirable political future to be wary of Whiggish assumptions about democracy’s inevitability. Human society has oscillated between desires for stability, security, and reciprocity—which is what feudalism, Marxism, and theocracy promise—and desires for mobility, liberty, and profit—which is what the Enlightenment offered on a world-historical scale. There is nothing that can be declared permanent in a bourgeois revolution, and our own Reconstruction, not to mention a good deal of recent history, is the unhappy proof.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Defending Reconstruction (2017)

Death, World, Democracy, History

“If you put it as “complex nervous systems” it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry… to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked “What’s so special about humans…?”, I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point.
…I could pose the same kinds of questions of you… So God says, “You are guys are really, really special.” How does his saying it make us special? “But you see, he gave us a soul.””

Shelly Kagan (1956) American philosopher

How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… “What’s so special about that?”
Debate: Is God Necessary for Morality? (2011)

Love, God, Guy, Behavior

“.. he [is Kirchner, writing about himself] was especially interested in the naturally naked human being. He knowingly broke the traditional manner of the nude study and created for himself in his studio [in his Brücke-years in Berlin] a circle of young women, whom he studied in their free movement. Thousands of drawings and hundreds of paintings and studies resulted from this. A beautiful, healthy, blossoming sensuality that never turns base emanates from these works.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Kirchner; as quoted in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: ein Künstlerleben in Selbstzeugnissen, Andreas Gabelmann (Claire Louise Albiez, translation); Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany 2010, p. 28
undated

Women, Beauty, Nature, Study

“Live for something! Do good and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storm of time can never destroy. Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy on the hearts of the thousands you come in contact with, year by year, and you will never be forgotten. Your name, your deeds, will be as legible on the hearts you leave behind, as the stars on the brow of evening. Good deeds will shine as the stars of heaven.”

Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) Scottish mathematician and a leader of the Free Church of Scotland

Source: Misattributed, P. 243. in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895). This is actually a quote from The golden chain; or, The Christian graces illustrated and enforced (1855) by John Harvey

Love, Star, Time, Heart

“In the year 1660 being importuned by some friends of his, I undertook so to teach Mr. Daniel Whalley of Northampton, who had been Deaf and Dumb from a Child. I began the work in 1661, and in little more than a year's time, I had taught him to pronounce distinctly any words, so as I directed him… and in good measure to understand a Language and express his own mind in writing; And he had in that time read over to me distinctly (the whole or greatest part of) the English Bible; and did pretty well understand (at least) the Historical part of it. In the year 1662 I did the like for Mr. Alexander Popham… I have since that time (upon the same account) taught divers Persons (and some of them very considerable) to speak plain and distinctly, who did before hesitate and stutter very much; and others, to pronounce such words or letters, as before they thought impossible for them to do: by teaching them how to rectify such mistakes in the formation, as by some natural impediment, or acquired Custome, they had been subject to.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

p, 125
Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)

Understanding, Nature, Time, Reading

“I've tried to make my writing itself therapeutic—that by your act of reading it your Life Energy may be enhanced. One of the ways I have sought to achieve this is to make it singable, as best I can do. Not singable like song lyrics, rather more chantable. Encouraging you to sing along, moving with its flow, its pulse, its pulsations.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: Facets of a Diamond: Reflections of a Healer (2002), p. 286

Life, Way, Singing, Reading

“The best time to write a story is yesterday. The next best time is today.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995)

Time

“There's always rhythm going in my mind. … I'm either singing them — June will tell you, I'm either singing them, or I have got the beat going from one, or I'm writing one.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

CNN interview (2002)

Singing

“She's (Hillary Clinton) a very dishonest person. I have one of the great temperaments. I have a winning temperament. She has a bad temperament. She's weak. We need a strong temperament and that's all it is, I have a strong temperament. … I think I have a great temperament. I beat 16 very talented people in -- and I've never done this before. You don't do that with a bad temperament. … I'm leading her in the polls, as you probably have noticed. And I think I have a great temperament. I have a temperament where I know how to win. She doesn't know how to win. She's not a winner. She doesn't know how to win. Honestly, she lies a lot and she really -- she should tell the truth. I honestly believe if she told the truth -- because she made some reference to my campaigning, I've had a beautiful -- I've had a -- had a flawless campaign. You'll be writing books about this campaign. And yet she's criticizing my campaign.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

People, Truth, Books, Beauty

“All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

Fifty-One Tales http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/851ta10.txt, The Raft-Builders

Sea

“Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

Diary entry for June 27, 1988, p. 177.
Writing Home (1994)

Life, Housing

“Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

E 65
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook E (1775 - 1776)

Lie, Books, Light, Reading

“If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."”

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

"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources

People, Feeling, Intelligence, Universe

“You ask if I mean to publish anything on the subject of a letter of mine to my friend Charles Thompson? Certainly not. I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that arena, I should only add an unit to the number of Bedlamites.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Mathew Carey (11 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, p. 42 1810s

World, Religion, Fight

“All Dickens is packed with orphans or people in uncertain relation to family groups, or clubs. It’s impossible to read anything he wrote without feeling that the question of belonging was a major issue for him. He had to write about these matters. If we read Lovecraft’s science-fiction horror stories, weird and unpleasant as they may be, they are all obsessively about fear of otherness—women’s, people of other races’, aliens’. All the over-heated horror of the books arises from this gut fear. He can’t leave it alone. Whether or not we like the books and quite regardless of any verisimilitude, it’s clear that the author is writing directly from his personal concerns. The stuff wasn’t just constructed for a literary prize. A certain form of repetition, particularly the endless reformulation, in dozens of different guises, of the same core conflict is probably the hallmark of authenticity.”

Tim Parks (1954) British writer

"In Search of Authenticity," The New York Review of Books (4 February 2015).

Women, People, Books, Fear

“Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age — too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Quoted in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur Schlesinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), page 1017. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx According to a footnote in Schlesinger's manuscript (1st draft, page 1378), this was stated on February 13, 1961. Attributed

Age

“The writings on the wall at North Point
Speak to a silent room
They shut the bars down, leave you to the gloom…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Islands (1987)

“In one of his letters Aurangzeb himself writes: “The fate of Dara Shukoh excited the passions of the misguided citizens of Delhi. They wept in sympathy with him and pelted the loyal Malik Jiwan who had brought him to justice with pots full of urine and excreta.” Royal troops went into action and according to Khafi Khan, “several persons were knocked down and killed and many were wounded… If the Kotwal had not come forward with his policemen, not one of Malik Jiwan’s followers would have escaped with life.””

Dara Shukoh (1615–1659) Indian prince

Khafi Khan, Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, pp. 245-46. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 6

Life, Fate, Justice, Passion

“Harmony, rhythm, concision, concinnity are all elements that are epitomized in poetry. Cultivated in poetry, which is the nucleus of the creative impulse, these elemetns serve every art form: acting a character, writing a novel, creating music, dance, sculpture, painting.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Degrees: Thought Capsules and Micro Tales (1989)

Art, Music, Dance, Painting

“I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers of Germany. I think we should be in a position which would be odious to every man who values freedom of action and independence, and also in a position of the utmost peril for our crowded, peaceful population, engaged in their daily toil. I dread that day, but it is not, perhaps, far distant. It is, perhaps, only a year, or perhaps 18 months, distant…There is still time for us to take the necessary measures, but what we want are the measures. We do not want this paragraph in this White Paper, we want the measures. It is no good writing that first paragraph and then producing £130,000. We want the measures to achieve parity.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1934/mar/08/air-estimates-1934#column_2072 in the House of Commons (8 March 1934) The 1930s

Peace, Thinking, Freedom, Distant

“The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.”

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

“The Obscurity of the Poet”, p. 24
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Context: People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end someone will pay you for being?... The poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it.

““How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.”
“Yes, miss,” he said wearily.
“You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.”
There was a long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.”
“Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.”
“Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.”
“What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?”
“I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly.
“You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.”
“I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.””

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 22 (p. 374)

Truth, World, Beauty, Art

“I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about jeep axle my work. The concept I plantatarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical continuity lift tab inherent in language horses and communication. My fascination with images open 24 Hrs. is based on the complex interlocking of disparate visual facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliche. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object Freight-ways by this, I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built-in..”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Quote from 'Note on Painting', Robert Rauschenberg, in Pop Art Redefined, October/November 1963, J. Rusell and Suzi Gablik, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1969
1960's

Fate, Way, Communication, Chance

“I must beg leave to recommend to your Excellency's consideration the appointing an officer to write and sign the necessary passes. The person I should wish to be appointed is Lieutenant Bio d get. If it was put in general orders, that passes signed by him should be deemed authentic, as if signed by me, it would leave me at liberty to pursue the more important employments of my station.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1776)

Personality

“I thought you could write something about me that men can't – What I want written – I do not know – I have no definite idea of what it should be. – but a woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and colors as an expression of living – might say something that a man can't – I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore – Men have done all they can do about it. Does that mean anything to you – or doesn't it?”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

In a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, New York 1925; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists, ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 224
1920s

Men, Color, Feeling, Idea

“Innis comments on how the invention of writing and the advancement of military techniques led to the founding of ancient empires: The sword and the pen worked together. Power was increased by concentration in a few hands, specialization of function was enforced, and scribes with leisure to keep and study records contributed to the advancement of knowledge and thought. The written record signed, sealed, and swiftly transmitted was essential to military power and the extension of government. Small communities were written into large states and states were consolidated into empire. The monarchies of Egypt and Persia, the Roman empire and the city states were essentially products of writing.”

Harold Innis book Empire and Communications

2007 edition, p. 30.
Empire and Communications (1950)

Communication, Knowledge, Study

“The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.”

Ralph Ellison book Shadow and Act

Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), Introduction, p. xix; in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 56.

Time, Past

“I love to write and I assure you I write regularly… But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.”

Jerome David Salinger (1919–2010) American writer

Interview in The Baton Rouge Advocate (1980), as quoted in "J.D. Salinger, author of 'Catcher in the Rye,' dies" in The Washington Post (28 January 2010) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/28/AR2010012803177.html

Love, Pleasure

“What someone says or writes about me doesn't change the way I am; it only changes my opinion about that person.”

Marcos Pontes (1963) Brazilian astronaut

Webpage Astronauta Marcos Pontes - Entrevistas http://marcospontes.com.br/$SETOR/MCP/OPINIOES/entrevistas.html

Way, Change, Personality

“Research to me is as important, or more important, than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.”

Leon Uris (1924–2003) American novelist

Explaining how all his novels were researched; quoted in his Guardian obituary, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/jun/25/guardianobituaries.books

Books

“What Machiavelli did not write but what the association between political systems and citizens' mental software suggests is that which animal the ruler should impersonate depends strongly on what animals the followers are.”

Geert Hofstede (1928) Dutch psychologist

Source: Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 1990, p. 81.

Animals, Dependency

“If I have one final word to say, I have to quote Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, when I met him after being appointed first prime minister. He told me this, 'You look like your father, you talk like your father, but please don't be like your father'. I think, what he said summed up my father. It is enough. With such an assessment, maybe it is not even necessary to write a book on Sihanouk and on me.”

Norodom Ranariddh (1944) Cambodian politician

, p. 136.

Books, Quotes, Thinking

“Academic writing excuses itself from rhetorical care in the selfless service of some precise truth—and then deforms our only means for speaking truth.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Christian Rhetoric: Scraps for a Manifesto

Truth

“[Writing] is an addiction more powerful than alcohol, than nicotine, than crack. I could not conceive of not writing.”

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

Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1990, p.6
General sources

Alcohol

“I, the solitary fish, a fish apart
(apart at least from the tree fish and the stone fish),
write, at isolated moments, a tiny fish or two
whose glittering scales, so fleeting,
may only be the dark's embarrassed wink.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"In Heraclitus' River"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)

Fish, Tree

“[writes Progressivism on chalkboard] This is the disease. This is the disease in America. It's not just spending, it's not just taxes, it's not just corruption. It is progressivism. And it is in both parties.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2010s, 2010

Disease

“Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Nobel Lecture (2010)

History, Literature, Idea, Learning

“The critic must be reconciled to his necessary, ambiguous role, and however much he may caper, joke, and posture for us in his writings, we are unlikely to forget that he is a man who may, at any moment, tread heavily upon our dreams — unworthy dreams, foolish dreams, stupid dreams, sometimes — but still dreams.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Stupidity, Dreams, Forgetting

“What I’m saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 10 (p. 164)

God, Way, Thinking

“I wouldn't say that I'm an orthodox Christian at all and the longer we live in the twentieth century the more fantastic discoveries are made, the more we hear what the universe is like I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my saviour and that sort of thing. I'm more interested in the extraordinary nature of God. If there is God, if there is deity, then He, even as the old hymn says, He moves in a mysterious way and I'm fascinated by that mystery and I've tried to write out of that experience of God, the fantastic side of God, the quarrel between the conception of God as a person, as having a human side, and the conception of God as being so extraordinary. … So these are still things that occupy me, and every now and again, if you're lucky, you're able to make a poem out of this conception of God … so I suppose I'm trying to appeal to people to open their eyes and their minds to the extraordinary nature of God.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen" in The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)

God, People, Way, Nature

“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

Life, People, Education, Way

“When Nature gives a gorgeous rose,
Or yields the simplest fern,
She writes this motto on the leaves, —
"To whom it may concern!"
And so it is the poet comes
And revels in her bowers,
And, — though another hold the land,
Is owner of the flowers.”

John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) American poet

"The Poet's License".
The Masquerade and Other Poems (1866)

Flowers, Nature

“John asked what he could do to help my campaign for governor.
"Write a campaign song," I replied.
"Okay," said John, "what's the theme?"
"Our campaign slogan is 'Come together, join the party.'"
"Great title," said John. He grabbed his guitar and started improvising.
: Come together right now.
Don't come tomorrow, don't come alone,
Come together right now,
Over me.
:* On first proposing that John Lennon write a song for his California gubernatorial campaign; this eventually developed into the Beatles song, "Come Together", p. 281 ”

Timothy Leary book Flashbacks

Flashbacks, An Autobiography (1983)

Help

“Sultãn Fîrûz Shãh composed a book also in which he compiled an account of his reign and which he named Futuhãt-i-Fîrûz Shãhî…“He writes in its second chapter… ‘Muslim and infidel women used to visit sepulchres and temples, which led to many evils. I stopped it. I got mosques built in place of temples’…”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Sultãn Fîrûz Shãh Tughlaq (AD 1351-1388)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî by Nizamuddin Ahmad.

Women, Books, Evil

“It was so frightening at the time to be seventeen and have heart monitors hooked up to you. That was the moment the songwriter in me was born. I discovered a whole other side of me. I came home that night and started writing lyrics. I discovered it all at once: It was like opening up a lockbox, and inside was a depth that I didn't even know I had as a person, or a writer — incredible creativity and vision and neurosis, complete neurosis. They all go together in a package.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

On the effects of having a critical cardiac arrhythmia at age 17 Hiatt, Brian (2006-09-21), "My Big Mouth Strikes Again" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/11515443/john_mayer_speaks_listen_to_his_hilarious_takes_on_paris_hilton_brad__angelina_living_in_ny. Rolling Stone. (1009): 66-70

Home, Time, Heart, Personality

“Maybe Delacroix stands for Romanticism. He stuffed himself with too much Shakespeare and Dante, thumbed through too much Faust. His palette is still the most beautiful in France, and I tell you no one under the sky had more charm and pathos combined than he, or more vibration of colour. We all paint in his language, as you all write in Hugo's.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 197 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

Beauty, Painting

“Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time— And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Salon.com (29 August 2001)

Men, People, Game, Time

“One could see that what you are writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. Now, for the first time, I can tell you that you are a disaster.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

Speaking to the press following a "postively productive" meeting http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=50688 with Bill Clinton (24 October 1995) Alternative translation: those anticipating a failure of the meeting "have failed" ("вы провалились"). 1990s

Time

“Well I think it [a 'Little Image' painting] does suggest hieroglyphics of some sort. It is a preoccupation of mine from way back and every once in a while it comes into my work again. For instance in my 1968 show at the Marlborough I have a painting called 'Kufic', an ancient form of Arabic writing. Every once in a while I fall back to what I call my mysterious writings. I haven no idea what this is about but it runs through periods of my work.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

Source: Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists 1975, p. 78.

Way, Idea, Thinking, Painting

“The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West.”

Harold Innis (1894–1952) Canadian professor of political economy

Minerva's Owl (1947), an address to the Royal Society of Canada, published in The Bias of Communication (1951) p. 10.
The Bias of Communication (1951)

History

“I am basically writing for a general audience rather than an academic audience. So, I explain stuff, I don’t assume knowledge of any of this on the part of the reader. In a kind of general sense I suppose I have, when I am deciding how much needs to be explained, in mind my primary audience.”

William Dalrymple (1965) author and historian

In Amrita Ghosh, Author in Focus: An Interview with Dalrymple http://www.cerebration.org/dalrymple.html, Cerebration.Org.

Knowledge, Sense, Parting

“My advice is to get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can't eat fame. And you can't write unless you want to write, and you can't want to unless you feel like it.”

William S. Burroughs book The Adding Machine: Collected Essays

"A Word to the Wise Guy"
The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985)

Money, Feeling

“I'm not a great believer in writing courses, though it must be said I've never been in one. It probably depends on what kind of writer you are. I'm very un-analytical about what I do. I don't plan much for the first draft. I try to let characters come out by themselves, rather than designing them. But other writers work differently, and for them the teaching process - which at least forces you to consider what you're doing, and why - may be very helpful. At the very least a creative writing course mandates someone to spend a period of their life just writing, which can be hard to do otherwise. But beware of thinking too much about what you do.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Life, Thinking, Help, Dependency

“To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Interview in Revolution OS http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308808/, documentary, 2001. 2000s, 2000-04

Life, People, World, Waiting

“I started doing electronics when I was a little kid, in the 5th or 6th grade, buying computer parts at a swap meet and writing my first programs. Simple things just blew my mind with respect to the sort of infinite simulation or combinatorial possibility inside the computer. My personal obsession from my childhood was that I just wanted to recreate reality inside the computer and then go in there.”

Philip Rosedale (1968) American businessman, founder of Second Life

Source: Peter Diamandis. " Second Life: How a Virtual World Became a Reality http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-diamandis/second-life-how-a-virtual_b_2831270.html," at huffingtonpost.com, 03/07/2013.

Reality, Parting, Childhood, Personality

“However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Flaubert (1893).

World

“The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.”

Gene Fowler (1890–1960) American journalist

Attributed without citation in Blythe Camenson (2002) How to Sell, Then Write Your Nonfiction Book. p. 188

Way, Reading, Success, Forgetting

“In truth the anarchists who assume the name have done nothing to challenge the state, not with windy unread jargon-filled writings, but with the contagious example of another way to relate to other people. Anarchists as they conduct the anarchism business are the best refutation of anarchist pretensions.”

Bob Black (1951) American anarchist

Anarchism And Other Impediments To Anarchy (1985)

People, Truth, Way, Business

“[These entrepreneurs] were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review, … but by a lack of custom.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 287.

Business, Personality

“However, there are all kinds of Writers. Some who know only one field themselves. Next those who know two or three fields in depth, and nothing more, and thirdly the majority who know a little about many things. Lin Yutang says, "It seems to me that simplicity is almost the most difficult thing to achieve in scholarship or writing," presumably because simplicity pre-supposes digestion and also maturity.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Writers

“In regard to matter after critical matter – the Aryan-Dravidian divide, the nature of Islamic invasions, the nature of Islamic rule, the character of the freedom struggle – we find this trait – suppresso veri, suggesto falsi. This is the real scandal of history writing in the last thirty years. And it has been possible for these ‘eminent historians’ to perpetrate it because they acquired control of institutions like the ICHR. To undo the falsehood, the control has to be undone.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

History, Nature, Freedom

“The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Source: Over the River (1933), Ch. 1

Housing

“All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"All Literature", from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

Literature

“Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Paris Review Interview (1990)

Pleasure, Books, Reading

“While I expected serious, rigorous evaluation of my work, I was totally unprepared for the hostility and contempt shown me by women whom I did not and do not see as enemies. Despite their responses I share with them an ongoing commitment to feminist struggle. To me this does not mean that we must approach feminism from the same perspective. It does mean we have a basis for communication, that our political commitments should lead us to talk and struggle together. Unfortunately it is often easier to ignore, dismiss, reject, and even hurt one another rather than engage in constructive confrontation. Were it not for the overwhelmingly positive responses to the book from black women who felt it compelled them to either re-think or think for the first time about the impact of sexism on our lives and the importance of feminist movement, I might have become terribly disheartened and disillusioned. Thanks to them and many other women and men this book was not written in isolation. … Such encouragement renews my commitment to feminist politics and strengthens my conviction that the value of feminist writing must be determined not only by the way a work is received among feminist activists but by the extent to which it draws women and men who are outside feminist struggle inside.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Acknowledgments https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)

Women, Men, Hostility, Books

“I realised fairly early that the 'wisdom of the ages' - whether from 3000 years ago or yesterday - often was simply and perfectly adaptable to the context of the football arena, and immensely valuable. From my regular morning habit of reading, I would write down any wise, pragmatic and smart quotes and ideas that struck me, and that I felt could be of use in coaching.”

Jack Gibson (1929–2008) Australian rugby league player and coach

On how he displayed the ability to deliver a one-liner or quote that always perfectly summed up a situation.

Wisdom, Age, Quotes, Idea

“The difficulty of writing English is most tiresome to me. My God! If only we could write this beautiful language of France at all times!”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

La difficulté d'écrire l'anglais m'est extrêmement ennuyeuse. Ah, mon Dieu! si l'on pouvait toujours écrire cette belle langue de France!
Letter to John Foster (7 July 1850)

God, Beauty, Time

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it's a really stupid thing to want to do.”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

This has commonly been paraphrased "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." More info at "Alan P. Scott : Talking about music..." http://home.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm Also, Costello has denied http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/ having coined this, in an interview in Q magazine, tentatively attributing the quote instead to Martin Mull. Misattributed

Stupidity, Music, Dance

“Dear Richard, I was just coming home from [painting] an interior [with people! ]. It was terribly dark today and yesterday, but today I made a pretty good study. I still sleep badly and feel nervous because of that... I don't need to come to The Hague for my drawing lessons... How long we will stay here [in nl:Heeze ], I don't know. I will write you at least in advance. If I don't start sleeping better I will not stay much longer, I think.”

Suze Robertson (1855–1922) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Suze Robertson's brief:) Lieve Richard, Zo eeven kom ik thuis van een interieur [met mensen!]. Het was vandaag en gisteren vreeslijk donker toch heb ik vandaag nogal een goede studie gemaakt. Ik slaap altijd nog slecht en voel me daardoor zenuwachtig.. .Ik hoef nu niet voor lessen [tekenlessen die ze geeft] naar Den Haag te komen.. .hoe lang we hier [in Heeze] blijven, weet ik niet. Ik schrijf het je in elk geval vooruit. Als ik niet beter slaap denk ik voor mij niet lang meer.
Quote of a letter of Suze Robertson from Heeze, July/August 1904, to her husband Richard Bisschop in The Hague; as cited in Suze Robertson 1855-1922 – Schilderes van het harde en zware leven, exhibition catalog, ed. Peter Thoben; Museum Kemperland, Eindhoven, 2008, p. 11
1900 - 1922

People, Feeling, Home, Thinking

“I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say [sic] my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Interview for The Collider (2008) http://collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp/aid/8878/tcid/1/pg/2.

Life, People, Way, Quotes

“Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Metro Weekly interview (2006)

People, Feeling, Motivation, Sense

“I had scarcely entered the room when I saw on my table an open book I had not put there. It was the works of Cardano. I did not intend to read it, but my gaze fell as though compelled on a story told by that philosopher. He writes that he was studying one night by candlelight when he saw two tall old men come in through the closed doors of his room. He asked them many questions, and they finally told him they were from the Moon; whereupon they disappeared.
I was so surprised, both by the book that had put itself on my table and by the page it was open to, that I took this chain of events for an inspiration from God, who was urging me to tell people that the Moon is a world.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Men, God, People, Books

“2) Never be embarrased or ashamed about anything you choose to write. (Think of this before you send it to a market)”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers

Thinking

“I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of — I am, however young, writing at random — straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness — without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to George and Georgiana Keats (March 19, 1819)
Letters (1817–1820)

Thinking, Light, Animals

“Indeed, a full understanding of Sraffa’s contributions can be difficult, since these must be viewed as a complex whole, as part of an extremely ambitious cultural project: ‘to shunt the car of economic science’ in a direction opposite to that –the subjective theory of value –chosen by Jevons, one of the leading early exponents of the marginalist approach. Thus, with his writings Sraffa contributes to exposing the weak points in the theories of the leading exponents of the marginalist approach, from Alfred Marshall and Arthur Cecil Pigou to Friedrich von Hayek, and of their present-day followers, and at the same time re-proposes the classical approach of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and also, in certain respects, of Karl Marx). The work of reconstructing the classical approach is also coherent with elements of the Keynesian contribution. This connection is possibly the most important issue in the current debate concerning the road to be followed in going on with the work started by Sraffa.”

Alessandro Roncaglia (1947) Italian economist

Introduction
Piero Sraffa: His life, thought and cultural heritage (2000)

Cars, Understanding, Science, Time

“The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it--would.”

John Edensor Littlewood (1885–1977) English Mathematician

Note quotation marks: Littlewood is repeating a joke without attribution. "Cross-purposes, Unconscious Assumptions, Howlers, Misprints, etc.", p. 59.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

“A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warm the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"The Black Art"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

Love, Children, Feeling, Girl

“… habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 182

Life

“I'm not a drummer anymore, on my gravestone, if there is one, if anyone writes anything about me besides hopefully being a dad, it would be that I sang in my band when I was in my 20s. So I was like, "Yeah, I should probably focus on this a little more," so I just practiced a lot.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

When asked about his singing.
AbsolutePunk.net, Patrick Stump, Part 1 - 10.06.08

Singing

“I write, not for the orthodox, nor for those who have discovered a new orthodoxy, Samaj or Panth, nor for the unbeliever. I write for those who acknowledge reason but do not identify reason with Western Materialism; who are sceptics but not unbelievers; who, admitting the claims of modern thought, still believe in India, her mission, her gospel, her immortal life and her eternal rebirth.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Dedication page
India's Rebirth

Life

“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Lutetia; or, Paris. From the Augsberg Gazette, 12, VII (1842)

Time, Animals

“Don't write, Ralph. You'll bring shame on your family. ' -- Hunter S. Thompson”

Ralph Steadman book The Joke's Over

Epigraph, p. ixx
The Joke's Over (2006)

Family

“I'm a writer who plays the piano. As I write, I find new things I like. I make them into what I call principles, and they become part of my playing vocabulary. That's the secret of what you get from composing. You get to discover things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. Much like a speech pattern, your improvisation patterns can get stale if you don't keep building your vocabulary. Each time you re voice something, you change the sound. When you do this enough, you get used to those sounds, and they start to come out as you play. You end up using voicings that aren't common, which gives you an auditory identity.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

As quoted in "Voicing With a Heart"

Secret, Change, Time, Parting

“It is now more than twenty years since I somewhat rashly undertook to write the Life of Dr. Young. For many years, however, after making this engagement, I found myself so much occupied by the duties of a very laborious college office, that I had no leisure to commence the work; and when the possession of leisure would have enabled me to have done so, my health became so seriously deranged that I felt myself unequal to any continued and severe literary labour. The undertaking was consequently abandoned, and it was proposed to transfer it to other hands; but it was not found easy to secure the services of a person who possessed sufficient scientific knowledge to enable him to write the life of an author whose works were so various in their character and not unfrequently so difficult to understand and analyse, as those of Dr. Young.”

George Peacock (1791–1858) Scottish mathematician

Life of Thomas Young (1855)

Life, Health, Understanding, Knowledge

“England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Forbes (2 April 2001), p. 172

Guy, Personality

“I’m only interested in playing competitively if there’s serious money on the line. I love playing, but at this point I need a concrete incentive to devote the time necessary to make that happen. If chess was my only love, I’d do it in spite of the financial hurdles. But because I love so many other things, writing and editing in particular, it makes sense to me to focus on that now.”

Jennifer Shahade (1980) chess player

Gothamist interview (2006)

Love, Money, Sense, Time

“I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.”

Will Self (1961) English writer and journalist

Quoted by The Guardian http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,-164,00.html

Thinking

“Cross, and Dempsey is denied again, and Donovan has scored! Oh, can you believe this? Go, go, USA! Certainly through! Oh, it's incredible! You could not write a script like this!”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

United States v. Algeria http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=DALDkkXodRU (23 June 2010). 2010s, 2010, 2010 FIFA World Cup Context: Four minutes of added time. That might lift the United States, that's time enough. Dreadfully negative, really. From the Algerians, they're looking for things on the break. I suspect they'll get a chance or two, on the break. Ghezzal, that's a good ball he's found there to Guedioura who plays it deep. Saïfi, with a header. Howard, gratefully claims it. Distribution, brilliant. Landon Donovan. Oh, are things on here for the USA? Can they do it here? Cross, and Dempsey is denied again, and Donovan has scored! Oh, can you believe this? Go, go, USA! Certainly through! Oh, it's incredible! You could not write a script like this!

“I’m your apprentice!” Simon protested. “When are you going to teach me something?”
“Idiot boy! What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to teach you to read and to write. That’s the most important thing. What do you want to learn?”
“Magic!” Simon said immediately. Morgenes stared at him.
“And what about reading…?” the doctor asked ominously.
Simon was cross. As usual, people seemed determined to balk him at every turn. “I don’t know,” he said. What’s so important about reading and letters, anyway? Books are just stories about things. Why should I want to read books?”
Morgenes grinned, an old stoat finding a hole in the henyard fence. “Ah, boy, how can I be mad at you…what a wonderful, charming, perfectly stupid thing to say!” The doctor chuckled appreciatively, deep in his throat.
“What do you mean?” Simon’s eyebrows moved together as he frowned. “Why is it wonderful and stupid?”
“Wonderful because I have such a wonderful answer,” Morgenes laughed. Stupid because…because young people are made stupid, I suppose—as tortoises are made with shells, and wasps with stings—it is their protection against life’s unkindnesses.”
“Begging your pardon?” Simon was totally flummoxed now.
“Books,” Morgenes said grandly, leaning back on his precarious stool, “—books are magic. That is the simple answer. And books are traps as well.”
“Magic? Traps?”
“Books are a form of magic—” the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, “—because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm. What did so-and-so think about such-and-such two hundred years agone? Can you fly back through the ages and ask him? No—or at least, probably not.
But, ah! If he wrote down his thoughts, if somewhere there exists a scroll, or a book of his logical discourses…he speaks to you! Across centuries! And if you wish to visit far Nascadu or lost Khandia, you have also but to open a book….”
“Yes, yes, I suppose I understand all that.” Simon did not try to hide his disappointment. This was not what he had meant by the word “magic.” “What about traps, then? Why ‘traps’?”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Morgenes leaned forward, waggling the leather-bound volume under Simon’s nose. “A piece of writing is a trap,” he said cheerily, “and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive—which is knowledge—alive forever. The more books you have,” the doctor waved an all-encompassing hand about the room, “the more traps, then the better chance of capturing some particular, elusive, shining beast—one that might otherwise die unseen.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 7, “The Conqueror Star” (pp. 92-93).

Life, People, Books, Age

“I have never looked like being in that incredible virtuoso class like, say, Stan Getz. I think people made a mistake and put me in that embryonic class when I was very young and thought that I was going to branch out to be a big instrumentalist in some way or another. But I always find that I very, very seldom get anywhere near what I consider a satisfactory standard. I would much rather be judged for my writing because writing is a thing that you can have second thoughts about and, if it isn’t right, you can’t blame somebody else but yourself.”

John Dankworth (1927–2010) British musician

Times obituary, 8 Feb 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7018290.ece

People, Way, Thinking

“Since my childhood I have enjoyed reading Martial Arts fiction. I write it myself first and foremost for my own pleasure, and then for the pleasure of my readers (there is also, of course, the financial reward…). I am just a storyteller, like the professional storytellers of the Song dynasty. I believe Martial Arts fiction is like Peking Opera, or ballad-singing, or dancing, or music—its main function is to give pleasure.”

Jin Yong

As quoted in the "Translator's Introduction" to The Deer and the Cauldron: A Martial Arts Novel, Book 1, trans. John Minford (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. xi

Pleasure, Art, Music, Singing

“You hold the pen like a needle in a seismic observatory, and in fact it is not we who write, but rather we are written. Writing means to read oneself”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

Reading

“The real writers are tenacious creatures, and they found a way long before there were writers workshops and creative writing courses in the universities. In the absence of formal frameworks, personal initiatives and informal frameworks become more important.”

Philip Ó Ceallaigh (1968) Irish writer

Interview by Tom Vowler (2010-13)

Way, Universe, Personality

“They're gonna write that I'm a fag and the people is gonna believe it”

Juan Román Riquelme (1978) Argentine footballer

After attending to a meeting arranged by criminals from the heavy supporters of Boca Juniors http://www.ellitoral.com/index.php/id_um/58529-manana-van-a-poner-que-riquelme-es-puto-y-voy-a-quedar-que-lo-soy

People

“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.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Playboy interview (1996)

Time