Quotes about writing
page 37

“At the end of my first term's work, I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed, and said a little stiffly: "I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays which you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others."”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 27.

Understanding, Appearance

“As I write, it is not yet clear who has won the presidential election. Win or lose, though, Mr Obama was not and is not the president. The Hawaiian long-form "birth certificate" he publicly endorsed and posted at the White House website last year as proof that he was born in the jurisdiction of the U. S. and is thus constitutionally eligible to be president is a forgery.”

Christopher Monckton (1952) British public speaker and hereditary peer

Win or lose, Obama was not and is not the president http://www.wnd.com/2012/11/win-or-lose-obama-was-not-and-is-not-the-president/ WorldNetDaily, November 6, 2012.

Birth, Housing

“Many scholars have felt that the Heronian passage [on a pipe-organ moved by an anemourion-like wheel] can be disregarded because it is not confirmed by other writings. Heron presumably mentioned the anemourion in a moment of distraction, forgetting that it had not been invented yet. We know that he was given to such lapses.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

4.7, "Use of Natural Power", p. 126
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Forgetting

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Introduction 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836)

God, Age, Religion, History

“Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.”

Tobias Smollett book The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).

Men, Age

“The man who saw his fellow US citizens burned alive, torn apart by a mob, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah, and responded by writing “Screw Them,” is now claiming to be the messenger of truth to the citizens of the US.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

May 1, 2007 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=25321_Kos_on_Truth&only

Truth

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose "story "plot" "continuity"… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer.”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Atrophied Preface
Naked Lunch (1959)

Sense

“Holy writing must strive (by all means) for perfection and true holiness, that a door may be opened to him in heaven.”

Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet

Preface.
Silex Scintillans (1655)

Perfection

“You can know how to win through strategy with the long sword, but it cannot be clearly explained in writing. You must practise diligently in order to understand how to win.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Water Book

Understanding

“Nothing can replace the excitement, the magic and yes the glamour of a Ziegfeld show. To see the great showman sitting in the second row busily writing his telegrams is a thrill no actress can forget.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

Hats, Hunches And Happiness (1945)

Forgetting

“My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Phlogiston interview (1995)

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do — and they don’t. They have prejudices.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)

Thinking, Learning, Teachers

“What are you doing, anyway? Writing code for IBM?”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

1996/1
About the readers

“Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to L.A. Avilova (April 27, 1899)
Letters

Fate

“She took us to see her granddaughter who was teaching in the Dominican convent in San Raphael, we went across the bay on a ferry, that had not changed but Goat Island might just as well not have been there, anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.”

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

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4, p. 289

Nature, Change

“It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

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

Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)

Thinking, Change

“One of Collingwood's earliest attempts to define the aesthetic essence of art. His aim, he writes in the preface, is to state a general conception of art and develop its consequences. His conception is one already familiar through the writings of others -- "that art is as bottom neither more nor less than imagination" -- but from his observation he goes on to outline the various distinctions between subordinate conceptions of art, and to attempt to demonstrate their place in the general conception, and the place of both in life. He urges that the meaningfulness of art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded, and that we must attempt to explain the process by which an artist reaches a particular point of view on reality.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Abstract
Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925

Life, Art, Imagination, Reality

“I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

"Into the lion's den" in The Guardian (26 October 2000) http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2000/oct/26/features11.g2

God, Hate, War, World

“To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

Just after completing his second autobiography, as quoted in The Marx Brothers: A Bio-bibliography (1987) by Wes D. Gehring, p. 137

Reading

“I do not feel capable of writing a single word of counsel to those dear young people, more than to say that my heart goes out to every one of them, regardless of the fact that I have never seen them and may never do so. I want them to find Jesus, and make Him a daily, hourly, and momently part of themselves. O how I want them to get the fullest measure of happiness and success out of life. I want them to see the Great Creator in the smallest and apparently the most insignificant things about them. How I long for each one to walk and talk with the Great Creator through the things he has created. How I thank God every day that I can walk and talk with Him.”

George Washington Carver (1864–1943) botanist

George Washington Carver: In His Own Words http://books.google.es/books?id=JcncXGNSJQQC&hl=es&source=gbs_navlinks_s (1991), edited by Gary R. Kremer, University of Missouri Press, p. 135

Life, God, Happiness, People

“(In writing Quiet) I was fueled by the same mix of passion and indignation that I imagine inspired Betty Friedan to publish The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Introverts are to extroverts what women were to men at that time--second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent. Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts, and many introverts believe that there is something wrong with them and that they should try to "pass" as extroverts. The bias against introversion leads to a colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

Glor, Jeff (interviewer), "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking," by Susan Cain," CBS News, January 26, 2012.

Women, Men, Happiness, School

“This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

"Recantation"
The Whole Woman (1999)

Books

“"The parts I like, well…" He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. The parts I don't like--well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word."”

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Part IV, "In Time of Plague" (p. 357)
Dhalgren (1975)

Parting

“…. We write our lives indeed, But in a cipher none can read, Except the author”

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–1879) British poet and hymn-writer

Autobiography (poem by Frances Havergal).

Reading

“Nobody ever wrote so well so fast as Jim. One year he wrote, and we published, nine novels. It was an obsession. Back in 1941, his father had been in an asylum in Oklahoma City, begging Jim to get him out. Jim needed money to get him out, so he said to his father, "Give me a month, and I'll raise the money." His father brightened, because Jim never went back on his word. Jim took a bus to New York City and went door to door to the publishing houses, asking for money for a hotel room, a rented typewriter and meals so he could write a novel. Finally, at Modern Age, they took a chance, and in 10 days he wrote a novel. But things being what they are in publishing, it was a month plus one day before Jim got his advance. The same day, a telegram arrived. His father had committed suicide, ripping the excelsior out of his mattress and stuffing it down his throat. When Jim would drink he would sometimes cry and say, "Why couldn't he have waited another day? Didn't he trust me?"”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Jim Thompson, 1906 - 1977," in The Los Angeles Times (May 1, 1977), p. X3
Other Topics

Money, Age, Drink, Suicide

“Thus, the way Romila Thapar equates Mahmud Ghaznavi with Harsha of Kashmir (twelfth century) as being both temple plunderers, can be shown up to be in gross conflict with the contemporary testimonies about the two….. Romila Thapar's explanation that Ghaznavi's behaviour was essentially the same as Harsha's, can only rest on an utter incompetence in reading the source material, or in a deliberate attempt to distort history. What is more, if at all one wants to compare Harsha's behaviour with that of the Muslim rulers, one should face the connection that the contemporary historian Kalhan explicitly makes. Commenting on Harsha's temple plundering, he writes :"Prompted by the Turks in his employ, he behaved like a Turk"…. Kalhan is simply saying that the very idea that a temple need not be respected, was borrowed by Harsha from the Muslim Turks. These already had a well-established reputation for temple desecration, and that is a fact to which the Nehruvian historians prefer not to draw the readers' attention….. So, here we have a case of a history professor who does not realize that the proofs he cites have hardly any logical connection with the thesis he proposes; or who is so assured about his eminence that he doesn't expect readers to notice the faulty reasoning.”

Harsha of Kashmir

Koenraad Elst 1991: Ayodhya and after: issues before Hindu society.

Way, History, Idea, Reading

““Will you write the story?”
“If there is one.”
“Happy ending or no?” He was serious.
She attempted a smile. “Fairy tales always have a happy ending.”
He leaned back in his chair. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you are Rumplestiltskin or the Queen.””

Jane Yolen book Briar Rose

Source: Briar Rose (1992), Chapter 16 (p. 91)

Happiness, Smile, Dependency

“My work in this area started around 1950 when I was still with the Cowles Commission. I was writing a more or less expository paper dealing with activity analysis…and happened to use the term “decentralization,” which was then often applied to the market mechanism as a sort of a selling point. But when I used the word “decentralization” I thought I should explain what I meant. So I made a footnote mark, went to the bottom of the page, and began writing, “By decentralization we mean…” But then it struck me that I did not know what we meant by decentralization. That was the beginning of many years of work trying to clarify the concept, because I thought that if we think this property is so important, we should be able to define what it is.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Source: David Warsh, " The Road to a System that Works (Without Shooting People) http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2007.10.21/69.html" at economicprincipals.com, October 21, 2007.

Thinking

“Sitting and writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from. It is like having a mirror held up in front of you, looking into yourself and asking these questions.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Women's Weekly interview (2006)

Life, Music, Question, Thinking

“The “animal rights movement” … is at once colossally powerful but ultimately hobbled by a weak spot both miniscule and fatal. … That colossal power emanates from hundreds of thousands of everyday activists who justifiably believe that conscientious consumers can, through a wide variety of measures, take gradual steps toward removing animal products from their diet. These true believers do the grunt work of activism: they hand out pamphlets, write books, blog, make documentaries, start campus veg societies, publish vegan recipes, open vegan food carts, work for animal sanctuaries, run veganic farms, and do basically anything they can to encourage consumers to contemplate the face on their plate. I consider myself a member of this noble tribe. The heel of the movement, by contrast, consists of a handful of radicals, mostly academics, who do little more than set an unrealistic benchmark of success … First, it seeks to eliminate all animal exploitation, in every realm of life, immediately, and without compromise or strategic capitulation; and second, it aims to eliminate all forms of oppression … The heel does not want the good, or even the better. It wants perfection.”

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"Radical Activism and the Future of Animal Rights", in Pacific Standard (3 July 2013) https://psmag.com/social-justice/radical-activism-and-the-future-of-animal-rights-61789.

Life, Books, Food, Success

“People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)

Life, People, Fear, Dreams

“Even if mankind had any desire to rid itself of the Seven Deadly Sins, Greed had been assured of a place in our hearts by virtue of time. By writing it down on a piece of paper and parading it as law and belief, Greed could be resurrected at a moment's notice.
That was the beauty of the written word. It was invariably taken at face value and granted permit to be spoken as the truth. It lived longer than the man.
And wreaked havoc in the process.”

Stel Pavlou book Decipher

Decipher, The First Time, p. 7 (2001).

Truth, Law, Beauty, Time

“In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1958) "Evidences for an Administrative Science: A review of the Administrative Science Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2". In Administrative Science Quarterly. vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-22.as cited in: John Van Maanen (1998) Qualitative Studies of Organizations. p.xx
1950s

World, Travel, Feeling, Imagination

“Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.”

Langdon Smith Evolution

Evolution (1895; 1909)

Life

“Through instrumental music, I’m allowed to come up with musical ideas that allow the listener to create their own impression of my song. If you add lyrics about a girl in the song, the listener doesn’t have a choice of what the song is about, it’s told to them. My musical writings allow me to express anything. It’s easier for me to tell a story of something I’ve encountered this way then to verbalize it. And my feelings are explored more in my compositions compared to what I could ever say in a few sentences.”

Bradley Joseph (1965) Composer, pianist, keyboardist, arranger, producer, recording artist

[Janus, Cicily, Radinsky, Ned, http://newfaceofjazz.com/?page_id=594, New Faces of Jazz: Bradley Joseph, (newfaceofjazz.com), 2010-08-01]

Music, Way, Feeling, Girl

“I don't intend to write depressing songs and I'd probably rather write happy ones”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

in Spongey Monkey #3.

Happiness

“I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work — just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Interview with BBC Radio 1FM (1994)

Feeling

“I made virtual animals in the computer, life-forms subject to an artificial evolution. I also went walking a lot on the beach and in the streets of Scheveningen for inspiration for my columns. Since 1986 I have been writing pieces for de Volkskrant national daily on matters that interest me. Often these are technical things, fantasies or musings.”

Theo Jansen (1948) artist

Source: The Great Pretender. (2007), p. 9

Life, Animals

“Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distributed' or 'higher-order' or 'applicative' and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1979) My hopes of computing science http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD07xx/EWD709.html (EWD 709). 1970s

“Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.”

Laurence Sterne book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Book II, Ch. 11.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767)

Thinking

“Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

"A Message About Messages" in CBC Magazine https://web.archive.org/web/20051128074549/http://www.cbcbooks.org/cbcmagazine/meet/leguin_ursula_k.html

Children, Books, Smile, Thinking

“At some point I thought that, as I got older, I’d come to terms with a lot of things. I’d solve some big problems, and eventually I’d become content. It’s almost more depressing to think that the older you get, the more your problems multiply. When I’m old, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not really do anything — just be happy to exist. I’d like to look at my accomplishments and sit back and revel in my own achievement. But I don’t think that’ll ever happen.
Before I made a living playing music, I used to work shitty job after shitty job and think “Man, as soon as I’m able to make a living in music, it’s really going to come together then, it’s really going be amazing.” I remember hoping there’d be 10 people at a show in 1998 when there was an incredible write-up in the local weekly. I don’t want to go back to that period of being obscure and having nobody know who I am, let alone have to struggle to get people to come to the show. I remember what it was like, and it was shitty.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, II

Happiness, People, Hope, Music

“To write is to read one's own self”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

Reading

“Beauty means perfect to me, but it also has an additional meaning having to do with being pleasurable, rather than painful. Beauty is hard to make. The making is painful, and involves a certain amount of craft, and a relaxation of the part of the brain that says, "Don't write that. X wrote those four notes in 1542 or 1979 or 1825 or whatever period you are worried about being influenced by."”

Beth Anderson (1950) American neo-romantic composer

Beauty is Revolution (1980)

Pain, Pleasure, Beauty, Parting

“I hope you will understand my hesitation in writing to one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Letter to H.L. Mencken July 28, 1934.

Life, Hope, Understanding

“We write as we feel, as we think, with our entire body.”

Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French writer

Le Problème du Style (1902)

Feeling, Thinking

“"Noah is a revolutio of Adam, as Moses is a revolutio of Abel and Seth," says the Kabala; that is to say, a repetition or another version of the same story. The greatest proof of it is the distribution of the characters in the Bible. For instance, beginning with Cain, the first murderer, every fifth man in his line of descent is a murderer. Thus there come Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methuselah, and the fifth is Lamech, the second murderer, and he is Noah's father. By drawing the five-pointed star of Lucifer (which has its crown-point downward) and writing the name of Cain beneath the lowest point, and those of his descendants successively at each of the other points, it will be found that each fifth name — which would be written beneath that of Cain — is that of a murderer. In the Talmud this genealogy is given complete, and thirteen murderers range themselves in line below the name of Cain. This is no coincidence. Siva is the Destroyer, but he is also the Regenerator. Cain is a murderer, but he is also the creator of nations, and an inventor. This star of Lucifer is the same one that John sees falling down to earth in his Apocalypse.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter IX

Star, Success, Drawing

“A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967), "A Note On The Notes", p. 262

Faith

“Vangelis has been writing and performing electronic music for three decades and suggests that it is perhaps the only genre - with the exception of "pure" classical music - that can comunicate universally.”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

https://books.google.hr/books?id=_hMEAAAAMBAJ
Vangelis Prepares For Blastoff On Musical Mission To Mars
Maria Paravantes
August 25, 2001
Billboard
113
34
50
0006-2510
2001

Music, Universe

““She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”
“You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?”
“None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.””

China Miéville book The City & the City

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 13 (p. 139)

Idea

“Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 244

Women, Books, Forgiveness, Thinking

“I [Boswell] was somewhat disappointed in finding that the edition of The English Poets, for which he was to write Prefaces and Lives, was not an undertaking directed by him: but that he was to furnish a Preface and Life to any poet the booksellers pleased. I asked him if he would do this to any dunce's works, if they should ask him.
JOHNSON: "Yes, Sir, and say he was a dunce."”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

September 14, 1777, p. 341
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III

Life, Disappointment

“Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Priest

Secret, Books, History, Sense

“I am interested in detail. I enjoy decoration. By accumulating this mass of detail you throw light on things in a longer sense: in the long run it all adds up. It creates a texture — how shall I put it — a background, a period, which makes everything you write that much more convincing. Of course, all artists are terrible egoists. Unconsciously you are largely writing about yourself. I could never write anything factual; I only have confidence in myself when I am another character. All the characters in my books are myself, but they are a kind of disguise.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

Books, Confidence, Sense, Light

“It was on his return journey that Pao-yü's father heard of the success and disappearance of his son. Torn by conflicting emotions he hurried on, in his haste to reach home and aid in unravelling the secret of Pao-yü's hiding-place. One moonlight night, his boat lay anchored alongside the shore, which a storm of the previous day had wrapped in a mantle of snow. He was sitting writing at a table, when suddenly, through the half-open door, advancing towards him over the bow of the boat, his silhouette sharply defined against the surrounding snow, he saw the figure of a shaven-headed Buddhist priest. The priest knelt down, and struck his head four times upon the ground, and then, without a word, turned back to join two other priests who were awaiting him. The three vanished as imperceptibly as they had come; before, indeed, the astonished father was able to realise that he had been, for the last time, face to face with Pao-yü!”

Herbert Giles book A History of Chinese Literature

"The Hung Lou Mêng", p. 383
A History of Chinese Literature (1901)

Secret, Home, Time, Success

“But he discovered his success later, when he began to write just like he talked.”

William McKeen (1954) American academic

Source: Outlaw Journalist (2008), Chapter 5, Observer, p. 74

Success

“All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.”

Truman Capote (1924–1984) American author

From a 1952 interview
Truman Capote: Conversations (1987)

Love, People, Faith, Art

“I used to see songwriting like editing a film or something. You can edit music like you can edit a film. Or if I was painting or making a picture or something, that night I could sit down and write a song. I think it really helps to break things up. Sometimes when you sit down to write songs, you write three or four songs in a row feeling the same sort of vibe. But if you stop in-between that time and change something, you break the pattern – you prevent yourself from unconsciously falling into a format.”

M.I.A. (1975) British recording artist, songwriter, painter and director

Interview http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2008/05/qa_with_mia.php to Westword (2008) Sourced quotes

Music, Feeling, Thinking, Change

“Writing, madam, is a mechanic part of wit. A gentleman should never go beyond a song or a billet.”

George Etherege The Man of Mode

Act IV, sc. i
The Man of Mode (1676)

Parting

“From that place the Sultan proceeded to a certain city, which was accounted holy by the people of the country. In that city the men of Ghaznin saw so many strange and wonderful things, that to tell them or to write a description of them is not easy' In short, the Sultan Mahmud having possessed himself of the booty, burned their idol temples and proceeded towards Kanauj….. The Ghaznivids found in these forts and their dependencies 10,000 idol temples, and they ascertained the vicious belief of the Hindus to be, that since the erection of these buildings no less than three or four hundred thousand years had elapsed. Sultan Mahmud during this expedition achieved many other conquests after he left Kanauj, and sent to hell many of the infidels with blows of the well tempered sword. Such a number of slaves were assembled in that great camp, that the price of a single one did not exceed ten dirhams.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Mathura (Uttar Pradesh), Kanauj (Uttar Pradesh). Habibu’s-Siyar in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. IV : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 178-80
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Men, People, Hell, Dependency

“She knew that her feelings toward Bean were completely different. No such dreams and fantasies. Just a sense of complete acceptance. She belonged with Bean, not the way that a wife belonged with a husband or, God forbid, a girlfriend with a boyfriend, but rather way the left hand belonged to the right. They simply fit. Nothing exciting about it, nothing to write home about. But it could be counted on.”

Orson Scott Card Ender's Game hexalogy

Petra
Ender's Game series, Shadow of the Hegemon (2001)

God, Dreams, Way, Feeling

“When I started writing I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

14th time lucky (2005)

Dreams, Way, Thinking, Memory

“Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you’re an author, you can tell whether you’re really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog.”

Max Barry (1973) Australian writer

August 8, 2005 weblog post http://www.maxbarry.com/2005/08/08/news.html#girlyman

Sex, Past

“Distortive or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindus. This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. And foreign correspondents used to trusting their Indian secularist sources have likewise developed a habit of swallowing and relaying highly distorted news stories. Usually, the creation of a false impression of the Indian communal situation is achieved without outright lies, relying rather on the silent treatment for inconvenient facts and a screaming overemphasis on convenient ones. (…) So, moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindus. Even if you are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not be made to bear any consequences.(…) These days, noisy secularists lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in Jhabua, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh and more recently in the court verdict on the matter. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the “facts.””

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara. Teesta Setalwad has reportedly pressured eyewitnesses to give the desired incriminating testimony against Hindus in the Gujarat riots.
K. Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, Agni conference in The Hague, in The Problem with Secularism (2007)
2000s, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Truth, Lie, Way, Feeling

“Rachikovsky: What if there appeared a document proving that modernization was a part of a Jewish plot?
Gorymikine: It would be absolute evidence of a threat the tsar could not ignore.
Rachikovsky: Exactly!
Gorymikine: Exactly Rachikovsky! It will make Witte’s advice suspect!
Rachikovsky: Yes, it will damage Witte’s influence and it will answer his majesty’s worry about who is behind the unrest! He distrusts’’’ Jews…it’ll be easy…
Gorymikine: But where is there such a document? I know of none!
Rachikovsky: No problem! We will make one in our secret service, the Okhrana back in France. We have been planting our own propaganda in The French press for years.
Gorymikine: It will take a very cunning forger to write it convincingly!
Rachikovsky: We will have no problem!
Don’t worry Gorymikine…I’ll be back in Moscow very soon with the ”weapon.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp.29-30

Secret, Problem, Appearance, Parting

“Blessed in sleep and satisfied to languish, to embrace shadows, and to pursue the summer breeze, I swim through a sea that has no floor or shore, I plow the waves and found my house on sand and write on the wind.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Beato in sogno et di languir contento,
d'abbracciar l'ombre et seguir l'aura estiva,
nuoto per mar che non à fondo o riva,
solco onde, e 'n rena fondo, et scrivo in vento.
Canzone 212, st. 1
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

Sleep, Summer, Housing, Sea

“People who are without writing have a fantastically precise knowledge of their environment and all their resources. All these things we have lost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are now able to drive an automobile without being crushed at each moment, for example, or in the evening to turn on our television or radio. This implies a training of mental capacities which ‘primitive’ peoples don’t have because they don’t need them.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Source: Myth and Meaning (1978), Chapter 2 : ‘Primitive’ Thinking and the ‘Civilized’ Mind

People, Knowledge, Training

“From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Beginnings, p. 179.
A History of Reading (1996)

Reading

“O deary, deary me," moaned the dragon; "this is too awful. I won't see him, and that's flat. I don't want to know the fellow at all. I'm sure he's not nice. You must tell him to go away at once, please. Say he can write if he likes, but I can't give him an interview. I'm not seeing anybody at present.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Reluctant Dragon

The dragon to the Boy.
Dream Days (1898), The Reluctant Dragon

“When, where, and how were you, Joseph Smith, first called? How old were you? and what were you qualifications? I was between fourteen and fifteen years of age. Had you been to college? No. Had you studied in any seminary of learning? No. Did you know how to read? Yes. How to write? Yes. Did you understand much about arithmetic? No. About grammar? No. Did you understand all the branches of education which are generally taught in our common schools? No. But yet you say the Lord called you when you were but fourteen or fifteen years of age? How did he call you? I will give you a brief history as it came from his own mouth. I have often heard him relate it. He was wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and felt the necessity of repenting of his sins and serving God. He retired from his father's house a little way, and bowed himself down in the wilderness, and called upon the name of the Lord. He was inexperienced, and in great anxiety and trouble of mind in regard to what church he should join. He had been solicited by many churches to join with them, and he was in great anxiety to know which was right. He pleaded with the Lord to give him wisdom on the subject; and while he was thus praying, he beheld a vision, and saw a light approaching him from the heavens; and as it came down and rested on the tops of the trees, it became more glorious; and as it surrounded him, his mind was immediately caught away from beholding surrounding objects. In this cloud of light he saw two glorious personages; and one, pointing to the other, said, "Behold my beloved son! hear ye him."”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 7:220 (August 14, 1859).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

Wisdom, God, Age, Education

“They deny good luck, love, power, romance, and inspiration
From La Jac Brite ointment and incense of all kinds,
And condemn in writing skin brightening and whitening
and whitening of minds. There is upon the federal trade commission a burden of glory
So to defend the fact, so to impel
The plucking of hope from the hand, honor from the complexion,
Sprite from the spell.”

Josephine Miles (1911–1985) American poet, academic

"Government Injunction Restraining Harlem Cosmetic Co." (1941) St. 2–3; Collected Poems, University of Illinois Press, 1983

Love, Hope

“Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I don't know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.”

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

"Malraux and the Statues at Baumberg," Art News (December 1953) [p. 180]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Way

“You should write about me, just like you did about Degas (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

version in original Dutch (citaat van de tekst van Jozef Israëls, in het Nederlands): Net zoals over
Remark of Israëls in a talk with the German painter Max Liebermann, c. 1899-1900, drinking coffee together in Scheveningen; as cited and translated by J. Sillevis and others, in exhibition catalog 'Lieberman en Holland, Haags Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag 1980, pp. 15-16
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1871 - 1900

“There has been writing for 10 days now”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Poetry

“Spring 1989 will always remain as a kind of watershed in intellectual and world history. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Immediately following in its wake came short interviews with or articles by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing the Satanic Verses. John Esposito, an American expert on Islam, claimed he knew “of no Western scholar of Islam who would not have predicted that [Rushdie’s] kind of statements would be explosive.” That is sheer hypocrisy coming from a man who has published extracts from Sadiq al-Azm’s previously quoted book, that had also dared to criticize Islam.”

Ibn Warraq (1946) Pakistani writer

Ibn Warraq: Why I am not a Muslim, Chapter 1
Why I am not a Muslim

Books, World, Quotes, History

“I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Mr. Clarke (1816-04-01) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Life, People, Way, Motivation

“The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court… When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Interview with the New York Times (29 October 1973)
Other speeches and writings

Hope

“The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.”

Lytton Strachey book Eminent Victorians

Preface.
Eminent Victorians (1918)

Life, Art, Evil, Time

“And they walk into these great big places, and there's excitement, and there's hope, and there's a sense of sin. 'Mother wouldn't want me to be here. What if Louise knew that I was here?' A lot of men, you know, would write home and talk about what was going on as if they hadn't seen it. I've been told what goes on in these gambling halls.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

The West (1996)

Men, Hope, Home, Sense

“I am writing to you in the hope that the conflict in Vietnam can be brought to an end. That conflict has already taken a heavy toll-in lives lost, in wounds inflicted, in property destroyed, and in simple human misery. If we fail to find a just and peaceful solution, history will judge us harshly.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Letter to Ho Chi Minh (1967)

Peace, Hope, History

“I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Life

“If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music.”

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) Finnish composer of the late Romantic period

Interview with Berlingske Tidende, June 10, 1919. http://www.sibelius.fi/english/omin_sanoin/ominsanoin_16.htm

Music

“With the success of my first story, l decided to make writing a career, though I was canny enough not to give up my job. But the job did not pay expenses and we had a recurrence of great poverty, sustained only by the thread of hope that I might make a living writing fiction. I cast about for a better job and landed one as a department manager for a business magazine. While I was working there, I wrote Tarzan of the Apes, evenings and holidays. I wrote it in longhand on the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper. I did not think it was a very good story and I doubted if it would sell. But Bob Davis saw its possibilities for magazine publication and I got a check … this time, l think, for $700.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) American writer

How I Wrote the Tarzan Books (1929)

Hope, Business, Thinking, Time

“When I was 13, I was flat as a board and totally unhappy about it. I would write in my diary every day, Oh, if I could just have a B cup by summer! I actually prayed for big boobs. So I developed at about 14, and then I was 15, 16, 17, and they kept going.”

Katherine Heigl (1978) American actress and film producer

Discussing her bust in an interview with Maxim (June 2000)

Summer

“We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something. i had to suck dicks this morning help me i gayyyyyy”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

.NET Briefing Day Speech (24 July 2002) http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2002/07-24netstrategy.asp 2000s

Way, Understanding

“It's like watching a nature documentary about piranha in which all the deadly fish do is write each other love notes: Eventually, we want to see them bare their teeth and shred an ox.”

Max Sparber (1968)

City Pages, (1/31/2001)

Love, Nature, Fish

“Her one serious failing was that she could not write above love. She could not write a story with more than one important character in it, whom she thought of for the moment as herself; with love there had to be at least two important characters.”

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

"Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)

Love

“How we treat our fellow creatures is only one more way in which each one of us, every day, writes our own epitaph—bearing into the world a message of light and life or just more darkness and death, adding to the world's joy or to its despair.”

Matthew Scully (1959) American political writer and speechwriter

Dominion (2002)

Life, Death, World, Way

“[The books of Euclid pass on to us] something admirable and very necessary to see and to read, namely the order in the method of writing on mathematics in that aforementioned time of the wise age.”

Simon Stevin (1548–1620) Flemish scientist, mathematician and military engineer

Géographie, in Les Oeuvres Mathématiques de Simon Stevin de Bruges (1634) ed. Girard, p. 109, as quoted by Jacob Klein]], Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1968)

Books, Age, Mathematics, Time

“Hasan Nizami writes that after the suppression of a Hindu revolt at Kol (Aligarh) in 1193 AD, Aibak raised “three bastions as high as heaven with their heads, and their carcases became food for beasts of prey. The tract was freed from idols and idol-worship and the foundations of infidelism were destroyed.” In 1194 AD Aibak destroyed 27 Hindu temples at Delhi and built the Quwwat-ul-Islãm mosque with their debris. According to Nizami, Aibak “adorned it with the stones and gold obtained from the temples which had been demolished by elephants”. In 1195 AD the Mher tribe of Ajmer rose in revolt, and the Chaulukyas of Gujarat came to their assistance. Aibak had to invite re-inforcements from Ghazni before he could meet the challenge. In 1196 AD he advanced against Anahilwar Patan, the capital of Gujarat. Nizami writes that after Raja Karan was defeated and forced to flee, “fifty thousand infidels were despatched to hell by the sword” and “more than twenty thousand slaves, and cattle beyond all calculation fell into the hands of the victors”. The city was sacked, its temples demolished, and its palaces plundered. On his return to Ajmer, Aibak destroyed the Sanskrit College of Visaladeva, and laid the foundations of a mosque which came to be known as ADhãî Din kã JhoMpaDã. Conquest of Kalinjar in 1202 AD was Aibak’s crowning achievement. Nizami concludes: “The temples were converted into mosques… Fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.””

Qutb al-Din Aibak (1150–1210) Turkic peoples king of Northwest India

Hasan Nizami, quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231 Ch. 6

Men, Food, Hell

“"The serious meaning of a concept," writes James, following Peirce, "lies in the concrete difference to some one which its being true will make. Strive to bring all debated conceptions to that "pragmatic" test, and you will escape vain wrangling. … If it can make no practical difference whether a given statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning."
If the method defined in this passage be accepted, and I can not see how any one can fail to accept it even if one prove unfaithful to it afterwards, then could anything more fully illustrate the meaning of the 'meaningless' than that hypothesis of other minds in which the analogy argument culminates? Whatever may be said for the reasoning, is its conclusion at least right? Alas, I can not know. If right, my experience cannot inform me if wrong, my experience cannot disillusion me. It makes no practical difference to me whether I am right or wrong. Pragmatic conclusion: I cannot have made a meaningful hypothesis.”

Edgar A. Singer, Jr. (1873–1954) American philosopher

Source: Mind As Behavior And Studies In Empirical Idealism, (1924), p. 5

Unfaithfulness, Falseness

“The idea of creativity is for me the problem of the future. Since the creative power is not a simple thing. It has a rich structure. It is divided into a lot of different principles and represented by figures, and these figures you can also write down in a kind of symbolic mantra. It is important to work on every point of creativity and see how the human being stands in the energy that comes out from the surrounding world.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote in a conversation between Lama Sogyal Rinpoché and Joseph Beuys, 1982; republished in: Joseph Beuys, Carin Kuoni. Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man. New York, 1993. p. 197
1980's

World, Idea, Problem, Future

“Some critics think the way I write is somehow disrespectful to food. But how can you write a restaurant column without being entertaining? You might as well not get up in the morning. People complain my sense of humour is puerile but the reason I have a job is because my sense of humour is puerile.”

Giles Coren (1969) British food critic, television presenter and novelist

Jewish Chronicle, 23 February 2007 http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId50455&ATypeId1&searchtrue2&srchstrGiles%20Coren&srchtxt0&srchhead1&srchauthor0&srchsandp0&scsrch0

People, Food, Way, Thinking