Quotes about writing (5027 quotes, page 38)

“… I do hear sometimes from programmers who are kind of sad that they don't have the opportunity to write game engines from scratch like I did and have it matter or make an impact… here's where some perspective really helps - I can remember when I was a teenager, I thought I had missed the Golden Age of 8-bit. And all of these are amazing! So, yeah, the opportunities that I had aren't there for people today - but there are new and better ones. And personally, I'm more excited about these than anything that's come before. So, thank you very much for this honor, but I'm just getting started.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

BAFTA Fellowship acceptance speech, "BAFTA Games Awards 2016" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyjJrF2gJ34

People , Age , Sadness , Game

“How many men with libraries over which one might write "For external use", as on druggists' labels.”

Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) French novelist

Que de gens à bibliothèques sur la bibliothèque desquels on pourrait écrire: "Usage externe!"
comme sur les fioles de pharmacie.
Source: Notes sur la vie (published posthumously 1899), P. 8; translation p. 340.

Men

“I think of Ramu. The Ramu I know and the Ramu I'm writing about have become indistinguishable. The same's true of the Bombay I'm recounting from experience and the Bombay I'm assembling through words. This is often how novels begin for me. There's a convergence. I live. Then something prompts me to write. The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Life , Thinking

“I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

On a heroine in Tales of the South Pacific (1947) in Commercial Appeal (31 December 1951)

Love , Problem

“You for whom I have looked so hard without ever finding. You whom I have longed for, called after, without ever seeing you come, you who are always present without ever existing – I am writing to you now. You who are basically only myself, but a much bigger and more noble self, an ingenious self, a self far from me, as real as the whole distance between the dream and the reality.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Dreams , Reality

“I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme… If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

"Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15195588 All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)

Thinking

“President Obama keeps insisting that ISIS is not Islamic. Well, maybe they don't practice the Muslim faith the same way he does, but if vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe, and they do, that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea, or drawing a cartoon, or writing a book, or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS, it has too much in common with ISIS. There's so much talk … about wiping out ISIS. You can't, not with bombs. You can only expose that something is a bad idea … Cultures are different. It's okay to judge that rule of law isn't just different than theocracy, it's better. If you don't see that, you're either a religious fanatic or a masochist, but one thing you certainly are not is a liberal. To count yourself as a liberal, you have to stand up for liberal principles. Free speech, separation of church and state, freedom to practice any religion or no religion without the threat of violence. Respect for minorities including homosexuals, equality for women.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/09/27/maher_rips_liberals_over_islam_if_were_giving_no_quarter_to_intolerance_shouldnt_we_start_with_honor_killers.html September 26, 2014.
Real Time with Bill Maher

Women , Books , World , Faith

“I was trying to solve the problem of this book. (My Life as a Man) When it seemed I never would, I stopped and wrote Our Gang; when I tried again and still couldn't write it, I stopped and wrote the baseball book; then while finishing the baseball book, I stopped to write The Breast. It was as though I were blasting my way through a tunnel to reach the novel I couldn't write. Each of one's books is a blast, clearing the way for what's next.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Paris Review Interview (1986)

Life , Books , Way , Problem

“The primordial forms of all sciences, taken back beyond the rise of writing, lie ultimately in the magic of prehistory. Just as modern man wants to indicate what consequences his actions will have, so also a man who grows up in the magical way of life seeks to find a ground for everything and to find consequences of his action. Magic as a more or less clearly formulated system of tenets shot through with emotional elements, can become independent only when magicians, acting as specialists, proclaim the consequences of certain customs, either esoterically,. e. g. at certain rituals, or exoterically as popular education. The magicians tell what cases are to count as 'equal', and when certain measures shall be used”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

if we think them ineffective, we call them ceremonies
Source: 1930s, "Empirical Sociology" (1931), p. 319

Life , Lie , Education , Way

“The man writes with such genuine passion for the books he's discussing. With so many critics you feel they're writing so people will say they're good critics.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

W. H. Auden, recorded in Alan Ansen (ed. Nicholas Jenkins) The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (London: Faber, 1991) p. 44.
Criticism

People , Books , Feeling , Passion

“Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals… And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 11

“In 1848, driven by a revolution in Paris, King Louis Philippe abdicated and Louis Napoleon (a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) was elected president of France. Four years later, after a coup d’etat, Louis Napoleon styled himself Napoleon II, emperor of France.
napoleon III’s first act as emperor was to imprison his political opponents. He was a crafty monarch, and his ambition during his reign was to seek glory through military adventurism while the great mass of French peasants remained ina state of poverty and despair.
Initially, Napoleon III achieved a short-lived public popularity by trying to “modernize” France and liberalize its economy, but his legacy remains that of a dictator and conniving politician.
In 1870, fearful that Germany was expanding too fast, Napoleon III declared war against this neighbor. The French were quickly defeated, and Napoleon III became a prisoner of war. Upon release in 1871, he was exiled to England, where he lived until his death in 1873.
Maurice Joly was mindful of this growing tension between Germany and France. He had been born in 1821 of French parents. He was admitted to the Paris bar as an attorney and was a one-time member of the General Assembly. Joly devoted most of time to writing caustic essays on French politics. He joined many other severe critics of Napoleon III, who regarded him as a ruthless despot.
In 1864, Joly wrote a book called “The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.”…It intended to liken Napoleon III to the infamous Machiavelli, author of “The Prince,” a treatise on the acquisition of power. Holy intended to reveal the French dictator’s dark and evil plans.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Will Eisner, pp. 7-8
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Death , War , Books , Fear

“Modi told me the last straw for him with regard to NDTV was when one of their correspondents Vijay Trivedi, accompanied him in a helicopter for an interview. When he started asking the same old insulting questions, Modi simply kept quiet and refused to respond any further. Piqued at being ignored, Trivedi spread the canard that Modi nearly threw him out of the helicopter mid-air because he had asked "tough questions". Modi says on that day he decided never to give legitimacy to NDTV by giving them an interview or responding to any questions from them. Vijay Trivedi treats this incident as a badge of honour and has boasted about it on numerous occasions—in writing.”

Madhu Kishwar (1959) Indian activist and writer

Madhu Kishwar, Manushi, "Narendra Modi on the Role of NDTV during the 2002 Riots" http://www.manushi.in/articles.php?articleId=1770#.U1aDWcdz_jE (8 April 2014).

Question

“I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Preface http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/vidal_su95.html
1990s, The City and the Pillar and Seven Early Stories (1995)

“The Japanese see things that way. They don't paint sunlight, they don't cast shadows that perplex one and falsify the true shape of things. The Egyptian figures have simplicity, dignity, directness, unity; they express motion almost as if by a conventional formula, like writing itself, so direct it is. So I seek a logical method of rendering my idea.”

André Derain (1880–1954) French painter and engraver

Source: The Wild Men of Paris', 1910, p. 407

Way , Idea , Painting

“When Andy [Andrew Wood] died, I couldn't listen to his songs for about two years after that, and it was for that reason — his lyrics often seem as though they can tell that story. But then again, my lyrics often could tell the same one. In terms of seeing everything as a matter of life and death — if that's what you're feeling at the time, then that's what you're going to write. It's sort of a morbid exchange when somebody who is a writer like that dies, and then everyone starts picking through all their lyrics. In Kurt [Cobain]'s case, whatever he was thinking and whatever he was writing, there wasn't an arrow pointing at what his demise was. It's a stream of thought, it's a possibility — it's definitely something that somebody was feeling when they were writing. It doesn't mean that it's going to happen. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't, either.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview, Alec Foege, Rolling Stone, 29 December 1994 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/the-rolling-stone-interview-chris-cornell-19941229,
Soundgarden Era

Life , Death , Feeling , Thinking

“We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for which we are ill suited. We write as if we belong to some other period. We are suckers for gorgeous words such as nenuphar, asphodel, and pelf. And because we are not yet in command of our vehicle we get out of control. We reveal ourselves inadvertently and we inadvertently commit ourselves to some point of view that really isn't "us" at all.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

"Wilfred Owen's Juvenilia" (p. 26)
The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (2001)

“Darwin's racism has nothing to do with the credibility of the theory of evolution…. However, after much research, I do concede that you won't find anything in Darwin's writings that would indicate that he in any way felt blacks were to be treated as inferior or that his views of them were due to their skin color.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Color , Way

“The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

"Two dogmas of Empiricism", p. 26
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

Mathematics

“It has always been my ambition since childhood to live such a life that one day my fellow citizens would call me to membership in this popular branch of the greatest lawmaking body in the world. Out of their confidence and partiality they have done this. It is now my sole purpose here to help enact such wise and just laws that our common country will by virtue of these laws be a happier and a more prosperous country. I have always dreamed of a country which I believe this should be and will be, and that is one in which the citizenship is an educated and patriotic people, not swayed by passion and prejudice, and a country that shall know no East, no West, no North, no South, but inhabited by a people liberty loving, patriotic, happy, and prosperous, with its lawmakers having no other purpose than to write such just laws as shall in the years to come be of service to human kind yet unborn.”

Sam Rayburn (1882–1961) lawmaker from Bonham, Texas

Maiden speech in the House (May 6, 1913); reported in Congressional Record, vol. 50, p. 1249.

Love , Life , People , World

“Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty.”

Marjorie Boulton (1924–2017) British writer

Anatomy of Poetry (1953)

Beauty

“It is not enough to "have" free speech. People must learn to speak freely. Noam Chomsky remarked in the sixties about the short-life ultra-radicals on campus who thought that Marx should have been burning down the British Museum rather than writing and thinking in it. The less political descendants of that faction have now tried to reduce life to a system of empowerment etiquette, and have wasted a lot of their own time and everyone else's in the process. But the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by the everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics, and not by the awkward handful who imagine themselves revolutionaries.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Politically Correct" (1991).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Life , People , Imagination , Lying

“"On the club scene we rate about two out of ten and 'Must try harder.' "We've had problems with our equipment and we can't get the P. A. to work because we play extremely loudly. It's a pity because Syd (singer Syd Barrett) writes great lyrics and nobody ever hears them."”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Melody Maker, August, 1967
Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett

Problem

“The Emperor ordered Jumdat-ul-Mulk to write to the Mutsaddis of all the subahs (provinces) of the empire that display of fire-works (atishbazi) is being forbidden. Also, Faulad Khan was ordered to arrange for announcement in the city by the beat of a drum that no one is to indulge in atishbazi.”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Akhbarat-i-Darbar-i-Mu‘alla, Julus 10, Shawwal 24 / April 9th 1667.
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1660s

“I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song, […] It's more like you write what comes to you… You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave…”

Eddie Vedder (1964) musician, songwriter, member of Pearl Jam

L.A. Times 5/1/94, "He Didn't Ask for All This".

Music , Cars , Feeling , Mood

“Writing the book (The Hottest State) had to do with dropping out of college, and with being an actor. I didn't want my whole life to go by and not do anything but recite lines. I wanted to try making something else. It was definitely the scariest thing I ever did. And a huge learning experience about how not everybody's going to like you, or like what you do. And you have to ask yourself, is it worthwhile? Or am I just doing it to be liked? And it was just one of the best things I ever did. The second book (Ash Wednesday) was so much more fun because of that. The first was just a novelty act, like, 'The kid from Reality Bites wrote a book? Who does he think he is?”

Ethan Hawke (1970) American actor and writer

And I understand that.
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/oct/08/features.fiction (2005-10-08)
2005–2009

Life , Books , Understanding , Thinking

“Mythology, science, space exploration, these are subjects that have fascinated me since my early childhood. And they were always connected somehow with the music I write.”

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

2001

Music , Science , Childhood

“Strictly speaking, the grammatical method of resolving a sentence into parts is nothing but a fanciful procedure; but it is the real fountain of all knowledge, since it led to the invention of writing.”

John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) English linguist

Source: The tongues of men. 1937, p. 15; As cited in: Angela Senis (2016) , " The contribution of John Rupert Firth to the history of linguistics and the rejection of the phoneme theory http://media.leidenuniv.nl/legacy/014-senis.pdf." Proceedings of ConSOLE XXIII 273.

Knowledge , Parting

“The central problem of novel-writing is causality.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"Narrative Art and Magic" ["El arte narrativo y la magia"]
Discussion (1932)

Problem

“I have not written a book since the campaign. I did not write this book at all. It is the result of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their right sequences the more suggestive portions of my campaign speeches.
And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. It is a discussion of a number of very vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken words. I have left the sentences in the form in which they were stenographically reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform, in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of their very lack of pruning and recasting.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Preface, p. vii http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PP11&dq=%22I+have+not+written%22
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

Books , Hope

“I certainly hope I'm not a scary person in real life, it's not like people run from me when they see me. People are usually pretty nice when they meet me. If they're scared, they keep their shuddering to themselves. But even if you're a nice person, it's easy to be scary as a character in a movie. All you need to do is devoid yourself of any feeling toward other people and regard them as a piece of meat. If you can imagine eating someone, or if you can imagine that person being dead, that can make you seem pretty scary. But if you want to get technical about it, most of what's scary is in the writing, not in the acting.”

Brad Dourif (1950) British actor

Brad Dourif Will Act In Horror Movies, But Won`t Watch One http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-11-15/features/9004040566_1_brad-dourif-exorcist-iii-cerebral-palsy-victim (November 15, 1990)

Life , People , Hope , Feeling

“This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones (1998)

Men , Pain , Books , Fear

“When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

"An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks", Contemporary Literature 11:1 (Winter 1970)

World , Thinking

“The evidence of evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy (Darwin's chief sources), but from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write. Doubts about the power of Darwin's idea of natural selection to explain this evolutionary process are still intellectually respectable, however, although the burden of proof for such skepticism has become immense…”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Life , People , World , Idea

“Brian Sewell is a fool. For some years he seemed to have it in for me and Hockney and Kitaj. Even if he wasn't writing about us he'd always find a way of bringing us in. He'd say, "so and so was a bad artist but not as bad as Hockney, Kitaj or Blake."”

Peter Blake (1932) British artist

Things like that.
Simon O'Hagan "Credo:Peter Blake", http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4159/is_20051120/ai_n15851377 The Independent on Sunday, 2005-11-20. Accessed from findarticles.com, 2007-01-22
Life

Fools , Way

“I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' I said, 'Well then, I'll beat my head against that wall.' I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that involved noises.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote from an interview in Observer magazine (1982), repeated on several occasions
1980s

Music , Feeling

“One of the stranger beliefs in science fiction is a passionate belief in Beautiful Writing--lots and lots of extraspecial exciting words thrown no hurled no CASCADED upon the reader in a shimmering shower of precious verbal gleaming gleanings and a singing pillar of righteous fiery syntactic spinach. The only thing that was good in that sentence was the spinach, and the hell with it.”

John Barnes (1957) American science fiction writer

That Style Thingie (1998 Essay)

Beauty , Hell , Passion , Science

“Our common speech contains numberless verbs with which to describe the infliction of violence or cruelty or brutality on others. It only really contains one common verb that describes the effect of violence or cruelty or brutality on those who, rather than suffering from it, inflict it. That verb is the verb to brutalize. A slaveholder visits servitude on his slaves, lashes them, degrades them, exploits them, and maltreats them. In the process, he himself becomes brutalized. This is a simple distinction to understand and an easy one to observe. In the recent past, idle usage has threatened to erode it. Last week was an especially bad one for those who think the difference worth preserving…Col. Muammar Qaddafi's conduct [killing his protesters] is far worse than merely brutal—it is homicidal and sadistic…and even if a headline can't convey all that, it can at least try to capture some of it. Observe, then, what happens when the term is misapplied. The error first robs the language of a useful expression and then ends up by gravely understating the revolting reality it seeks to describe…Far from being brutalized by four decades of domination by a theatrical madman, the Libyan people appear fairly determined not to sink to his level and to be done with him and his horrible kin. They also seem, at the time of writing, to want this achievement to represent their own unaided effort. Admirable as this is, it doesn't excuse us from responsibility. The wealth that Qaddafi is squandering is the by-product of decades of collusion with foreign contractors. The weapons that he is employing against civilians were not made in Libya; they were sold to him by sophisticated nations.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

People , Error , Understanding , Thinking

“The political Right currently runs the country. That's very annoying, but pretending it isn't true is foolhardy. What is really annoying is that in the late 1970s some of us were giving speeches and writing articles explaining that rightists intended to take over the country. It wasn't hard to figure that out, since at the same time right-wing ideologues and strategists were also giving speeches and writing articles describing in elaborate detail how they planned to do it. Well, they did it.”

Chip Berlet (1949) American political analyst

"Eyes Right: Social Movements Need An Infrastructure To Succeed" (Chop Berlet on countering the rise of the political Right), in Z Magazine, Vol. 18 (2005), p. 17; also quoted in Flanders Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics From the Politicians (2007), p. 109

Time , Country

“At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don’t really think of myself as "writing humor." I’m simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious. Here’s the thing. Most of what we witness in life is too complex to take in whole. Because of this we unconsciously edit what we see, select what to really record and what to ignore, which is why people who look at the same thing don’t necessarily see the same thing… Comic writers don’t so much invent funny things as strip away the distractions, the impediments to laughter.”

Richard Russo (1949) American novelist, short story writer and screenwriter

Life , People , World , Thinking

“Who says that Adam didn’t write and hand down writings to Noah who brought them on board the ark?”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

As quoted in My Encounter with Ken Ham's Giant Ark http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/july-web-only/ken-ham-ark-encounter-visit.html?start=1, Christian Post (July 22, 2016)

“I decided a handful of years ago that I just want to write songs that you can understand as soon as you put the record on. There’s no need to veil what’s happening in the song the way I used to.
My goal as a songwriter now is to simply write some memorable turns of phrase.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, II

Way , Understanding

“And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency. … It's my job and my vice mixed together. You can't hope for better than that: having your job and your sin commingled.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Introduction to The Golden Man (1980)

Love , Life , Hope , Music

“The worship of images is intimately connected with that of the saints. They were rejected by the primitive Christians; but St Irenæus, who lived in the second century, relates that there was a sect of heretics, the Carpocratians, who worshipped, in the manner of Pagans, different images representing Jesus Christ, St Paul, and others. The Gnostics had also images; but the church rejected their use in a positive manner, and a Christian writer of the third century, Minutius Felix, says that “the Pagans reproached the Christians for having neither temples nor simulachres;” and I could quote many other evidences that the primitive Christians entertained a great horror against every kind of images, considering them as the work of demons. It appears, however, that the use of pictures was creeping into the church already in the third century, because the council of Elvira in Spain, held in 305, especially forbids to have any picture in the Christian churches. These pictures were generally representations of some events, either of the New 5 In his Treatise given below. 11 or of the Old Testament, and their object was to instruct the common and illiterate people in sacred history, whilst others were emblems, representing some ideas connected with the doctrines [008] of Christianity. It was certainly a powerful means of producing an impression upon the senses and the imagination of the vulgar, who believe without reasoning, and admit without reflection; it was also the most easy way of converting rude and ignorant nations, because, looking constantly on the representations of some fact, people usually end by believing it. This iconographic teaching was, therefore, recommended by the rulers of the church, as being useful to the ignorant, who had only the understanding of eyes, and could not read writings.6 Such a practice was, however, fraught with the greatest danger, as experience has but too much proved. It was replacing intellect by sight.7 Instead of elevating man towards God, it was bringing down the Deity to the level of his finite intellect, and it could not but powerfully contribute to the rapid spread of a pagan anthropomorphism in the church.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Source: A Treatise of Relics (1543), p. 10-11

God , People , Way , Quotes

“A science fiction writer is—or should be—constrained by what is, or logically might be. That can mean simple fidelity to facts (which, in science, are always more important than theories—though Lord knows the two help shape each other, undermining the convenient, complacent separation of observer and observed). To me it also means heeding the authentic, the actual and concrete. Bad fiction uses the glossy generality; good writing needs the smattering of detail, the unrelenting busy mystery of the real.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Afterword to Exposures, p. 246
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Business , Science , Help

“All my sermons are prepared in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. As recreation is most pleasant and profitable in the sun, so homiletic creativity is best nourished before the Eucharist. The most brilliant ideas come from meeting God face to face. The Holy Spirit that presided at the Incarnation is the best atmosphere for illumination. Pope John Paul II keeps a small desk or writing pad near him whenever he is in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament; and I have done this all my life — I am sure for the same reason he does, because a lover always works better when the beloved is with him.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Treasure in Clay : The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen (1980)

Life , God , Lovers , Idea

“We wanted to start a magazine, and Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman from the band Bratmobile had started a little fanzine called Riot Grrrl and we were writing little things for it. I'd always wanted to start a big magazine with really cool, smart writing in it, and I wanted to see if the other punk girls in D. C. that I was meeting were interested in that. So I called a meeting and found a space for it, and it just turned into this sort of consciousness-raising thing. I realized really quickly that a magazine wasn't the way to go. People wanted to be having shows, and teaching each other how to play music, and writing fanzines, so that started happening. It got some press attention, and girls in other places would be like "I wanna do that. I wanna start one of those."”

Kathleen Hanna (1968) American musician and feminist activist

Index Magazine (2000).
On riot grrrl

People , Music , Way , Girl

“Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

[Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message, 2000, 2002, 9780849943270, 28-29]
2000s

People , Books , Home , History

“Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.”

Donald Davidson (1893–1968) American poet, essayist, critic and author

Lee in the Mountains

Housing

“Why did his interest in the concept of spontaneous order and the history of the doctrine of unintended social consequences undergo very little development after the 1960s? All of his political writings are in fact amazingly repetitious, exploring a small number of big themes which, however, are not further refined or extended in new contexts. As organizing concepts, they held, I am convinced, enormous potentialities but nevertheless Hayek himself failed to realize them.”

Mark Blaug (1927–2011) British economist

Hayek revisited (1993)

History

“Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism—sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not—as for Western critics—the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments. It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor, of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own. In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith, based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

God , People , Faith , Religion

“Though Lewis' views frequently are well left of center on the political spectrum, his writing is moderate. Lewis is at once passionate and logical - great to argue with in your head.”

Anthony Lewis (1927–2013) American journalist

[Richard H., Weiss, November 5, 1998, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Times columnist likes to mine a vein of thought, G1]
About

Passion

“It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,—this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Education , Art , Learning , Universe

“All sultans were keen on making slaves, but Muhammad Tughlaq became notorious for enslaving people. He appears to have outstripped even Alauddin Khalji and his reputation in this regard spread far and wide. Shihabuddin Ahmad Abbas writes about him thus:
“The Sultan never ceases to show the greatest zeal in making war upon infidels… Everyday thousands of slaves are sold at a very low price, so great is the number of prisoners”. Muhammad Tughlaq did not only enslave people during campaigns, he was also very fond of purchasing and collecting foreign and Indian slaves. According to Ibn Battuta one of the reasons of estrangement between Muhammad Tughlaq and his father Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, when Muhammad was still a prince, was his extravagance in purchasing slaves. Even as Sultan, he made extensive conquests. He subjugated the country as far as Dwarsamudra, Malabar, Kampil, Warangal, Lakhnauti, Satgaon, Sonargaon, Nagarkot and Sambhal to give only few prominent place-names. There were sixteen major rebellions in his reign which were ruthlessly suppressed. In all these conquests and rebellions, slaves were taken with great gusto. For example, in the year 1342 Halajun rose in rebellion in Lahore. He was aided by the Khokhar chief Kulchand. They were defeated. “About three hundred women of the rebels were taken captive, and sent to the fort of Gwalior where they were seen by Ibn Battutah.” Such was their influx that Ibn Battutah writes: “At (one) time there arrived in Delhi some female infidel captives, ten of whom the Vazir sent to me. I gave one of them to the man who had brought them to me, but he was not satisfied. My companion took three young girls, and I do not know what happened to the rest.” Iltutmish, Muhammad Tughlaq and Firoz Tughlaq sent gifts of slaves to Khalifas outside India….. Ibn Battutah’s eye-witness account of the Sultan’s gifting captured slave girls to nobles or arranging their marriages with Muslims on a large scale on the occasion of the two Ids, corroborates the statement of Abbas. Ibn Battutah writes that during the celebrations in connection with the two Ids in the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, daughters of Hindu Rajas and those of commoners, captured during the course of the year were distributed among nobles, officers and important foreign slaves. “On the fourth day men slaves are married and on the fifth slave-girls. On the sixth day men and women slaves are married off.” This was all in accordance with the Islamic law. According to it, slaves cannot many on their own without the consent of their proprietors. The marriage of an infidel couple is not dissolved by their jointly embracing the faith. In the present case the slaves were probably already converted and their marriages performed with the initiative and permission the Sultan himself were valid. Thousands of non-Muslim women were captured by the Muslims in the yearly campaigns of Firoz Tughlaq, and under him the id celebrations were held on lines similar to those of his predecessor. In short, under the Tughlaqs the inflow of women captives never ceased.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5 (quoting Masalik-ul-Absar, E.D., III, 580., Battutah)

Women , Men , Marriage , War

“Sir John Mandeville [was] an encyclopedist whose mostly invented stories still ring true, thanks to his gift for writing the first realistic Western fiction since Petronius. We do not know who this man was or even what language he wrote in, but modern textual analysis suggests that he rarely left his study. Rather than travel, he scavenged and plagiarized the works of others, improving their prose as he claimed their discoveries. In a period of continental isolation, Mandeville satisfied Europe's appetite for news by making up an East that sounded real. In expanding editions and translations, his Voyages and Travels became the most popular prose book of the Middle Ages.”

John Mandeville (1300–1372) writer

Michael Wolfe One Thousand Roads to Mecca (New York: Grove Press, 1999) p. 75.
Criticism

Books , Age , Travel , Study

“His writings include works on mechanics, sound, astronomy, the tides, the laws of motion, the Torricellian tube, botany, physiology, music, the calendar (in opposition to the Gregorian reform), geology, and the compass,—a range too wide to allow of the greatest success in any of the lines of his activity. He was also an ingenious cryptologist and assisted the government in deciphering diplomatic messages.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

History of Mathematics (1923) Vol.1

Law , Music , Success

“The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

Life , Truth , Age , Beauty

“About Archimedes one remembers that he did strange things: he ran around naked shouting Heureka!, plunged crowns into water, drew geometric figures as he was about to be killed, and so on. … One ends up forgetting he was a scientist of whom we still have many writings.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

1.1, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution", p. 6
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Water , Forgetting

“Dear Hawkesworth, Mother Goose came to a rehearsal before Christmas day, having arrived on Saturday for the knife... Many thanks for the brace of pheasants and hares—by the same train—indeed, I think it fortunate, for with all the strife and strike of pokers and stokers for the railroads - their commons every day growing worse - in shareholders and directors squabbling about the winding up the last Bill, to come to some end for those lines known or supposed to be in difficulty... I am sorry to say my health is much on the wain. I cannot bear the same fatigue, or have the same bearing against it, I formerly had - but time and tide stop not - but I must stop writing for today..”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote from Turner's letter to Mr. Hawkesworth, 24 December, 1849; as quoted in The life of J.M.W. Turner, Volume II, George Walter Thornbury; Hurst and Blackett Publishers, London, 1862, pp. 90-91
1821 - 1851

Health , Thinking , Time , Christmas

“What I admire in the ancient philosophers is their desire to make their lives conform to their writings, a trait which we notice in Plato, Theophrastus and many others. Practical morality was so truly their philosophy's essence that many, such as Xenocrates, Polemon, and Speusippus, were placed at the head of schools although they had written nothing at all. Socrates was none the less the foremost philosopher of his age, although he had not composed a single book or studied any other science than ethics.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Ce que j'admire dans les anciens philosophes, c'est le désir de conformer leurs mœurs à leurs écrits: c'est ce que l'on remarque dans Platon, Théophraste et plusieurs autres. La Morale pratique était si bien la partie essentielle de leur philosophie, que plusieurs furent mis à la tête des écoles, sans avoir rien écrit; tels que Xénocrate, Polémon, Heusippe, etc. Socrate, sans avoir donné un seul ouvrage et sans avoir étudié aucune autre science que la morale, n'en fut pas moins le premier philosophe de son siècle.
Maximes et Pensées (Van Bever, Paris : 1923), #448
Maxims and Considerations, #448

Books , Age , School , Study

“I have had direct experience of this myself. Often, what the press wrote, or did not write, about a remark I made somewhere proved to be of a far greater consequence than the remark itself. Democratic choice in such cases ceases to be a choice between alternatives people are familiar with, and have personally tried, and becomes a choice between alternatives offered by those who run the media.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Onassis Prize For Man and Mankind (1993)

People , Personality

“I knew I was destined for London, so I came to live with my nan in her council flat. It was the summer after my A-levels. Got a job in Willesden cemetery. I was getting a man’s wage, filling in graves. Stood around while they did the last rites. Cut the grass. A lot of the time I’d just sit on the gravestones and read and write. Scribbling away.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

The Sunday Times, May 16, 2006
Britain

Grass , Time , Reading , Summer

“I used to [look at the Linux source code], for Plan 9. They were always ahead of us—they just had massively more resources to deal with hardware. So when we'd run across a piece of hardware, I'd look at the Linux drivers for it and write Plan 9 drivers for it. Now I have no reason to look at it. I run Linux. And I occasionally look at code, but rarely, so I can't really tell whether the quality has gotten better or not [since 1999]. But certainly the reliability has gotten better.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

Ken Thompson; cited in [Seibel, Peter, Coders At Work, 2009, 479]
"Coders At Work", 2009

“I would write your Excellency a more particular account of the battle and retreat, but I imagine General Sullivan and Colonel Laurens have done it already, and I am myself very much unwell. I have had no sleep for three nights and days, being severely afflicted with the asthma.”

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

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Imagination , Sleep , Affliction , Night

“Even people who do cleaning work can write fairy tales. And they can even make better work than me. The problem is that no one encourages them to do so. The most essential thing that people seek is appreciation by others. That is what largely decides one's success or failure.”

Zheng Yuanjie (1955) Chiese writer

Zheng Yuanjie (2004) in: "Zheng Yuanjie's 19 years in fairy tales" on chinadaily.com.cn, May 10, 2004 ( online http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-05/10/content_329434.htm).

People , Failure , Problem , Success

“I am the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism. I am the contemporary of a strange twilight when the clouds above are dissolving amid the clash of arms and the cries of the tortured. The only revolution I know, the one which may grant notoriety to this century, is the Nazi plague and red fascism. Hitler did not die in Berlin. Conqueror of his conquerors, he won the war in the stormy night into which he plunged Europe. Stalin did not die in Moscow nor at the Twentieth Congress. He is here among us, a stowaway in the history that he still haunts and bends to his mad will. You say the world is doing well? It's certain in any case that it keeps on going, since it isn't changing. But never before has the will to death become so nakedly and cynically unleashed. For the first time the gods have left us, no doubt weary of wandering on the plain of ashes where we have made our home. And I am writing in an age of Barbarism which is already, silently, remaking the world of men.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948) French film director and philosopher

Source: Barbarism with a Human Face (1977), p. ix

Death , Men , God , War

“There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached by Ravel towards the end of La Valse and towards the beginning of Bolero).”

Constant Lambert (1905–1951) British composer and conductor

"Exoticism and Low Life", p. 174.
Music, Ho! (1934)

Time , Dance

“I am a composer first and foremost, and have always believed that being able to write memorable melodies is what sets musicians apart.”

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

“If I were a better artist, I'd be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I'd write books — but I'm not, so I draw cartoons!”

Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) American cartoonist

1992, as quoted by Tom Tomorrow in his comic strip This Modern World (21 February 2000) http://archive.salon.com/comics/tomo/2000/02/21/tomo/index.html

Books , Drawing

“What about [my] books? How do I feel about them?
I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky. Then The Man in the High Castle. Martian Time-Slip (published by Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun and The Penultimate Truth, both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another Ace book, The Simulacra.
But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a "human." When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn't correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.
Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and another as yet untitled Ubik]. Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it's a good book. I like it for one thing: It deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real sheep is Somebody… and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he'll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"Self Portrait" (1968), reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995), ed. Lawrence Sutin

Love , War , Truth , Books

“The story of Ramachandra, as narrated in the Valmiki Ramayan and the Adhyatma Ramayan, after reinforcing and revitalizing it with the essence of whatever the Puranas, the Vedas, and other scriptures could give, I, Tulsidas, am writing for the delight of my own soul.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

In the invocation of his epic poetry of Ramacharitamanas. Quoted in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 91

Soul

“You may not believe it,
But I don't believe in miracles anymore.
And when I think about it,
I don't believe I ever did for sure.
All the things I've said in songs,
All the purple prose you bought from me.
Reality's just black and white.
The sentimental things I'd write
Never meant that much to me.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

This Train Don't Stop There Anymore
Song lyrics, Songs from the West Coast (2001)

Thinking , Reality

“Another thing. This idea of "I'm offended". Well I've got news for you. I'm offended by a lot of things too. Where do I send my list? Life is offensive. You know what I mean? Just get in touch with your outer adult. And grow up. And move on. Reasonable people don't write letters because… A: They have lives and B, they understand it's just TV. C: If they see something they don't like, something they do like might be on later. I've seen many comics I've hated. I've seen many shows that have offended me. I've never written a letter. I just go about my life.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Interview with Howard Stern

Life , Hate , People , Idea

“When she wakes up in the morning
She writes down all her dreams
Reads like the Book of Revelations
Or the Beano or the unabridged Ulysses
Oh, I really wanna know
So tell me, Where does all the money go?
Where does all the money go?
Straight, straight up her nose”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"What a Waster"(with Carl Barat)
Lyrics and poetry

Money , Books , Dreams , Reading

“If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Revenge of the Nerds" http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html May 2002

Question , Problem

“My objection to metre is that it enables people to write verse with no poetic inspiration.”

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

Lecture on Modern Poetry (1914)

People

“I am the entertainer, I've come to do my show
You've heard my latest record, it's been on the radio
It took me years to write it, they were the best years of my life
It was a beautiful song but it ran too long
If you're gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

The Entertainer.
Song lyrics, Streetlife Serenade (1974)

Life , Beauty

“I'd do some things differently if I were writing this book from scratch today. I would be more nuanced in the history sections. I'd be less inclined to see everyone at "Self-development Stages Six and Seven" as the cat's meow. Above all, perhaps, I would emphasize that some of what I call "monolithic institutions" are evolving (i. e., are being shoved by us) in a positive direction today – so I'd bend over backward to encourage immersion as well as resistance. We need transformers everywhere, inside "The System" as well as outside it. But even with such "flaws" (mainly the flaws of youth), I think New Age Politics is still the best single expression of the new politics as a coherent, systemic, integral whole.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Page 17.
New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative (2015)

Books , Youth , Age , History

“I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

As quoted in "Literary witness to century of turmoil" in China Daily (24 November 2003) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-11/24/content_284041.htm

Peace

““Then shall it come to pass the saying that is written,” a voice said. “Death is swallowed up. In victory.” Perhaps only Fred heard it. “Because,” the voice said, “as soon as the writing appears backward, then you know which is illusion and which is not. The confusion ends, and death, the last enemy, Substance Death, is swallowed not into the body but up—in victory. Behold, I tell you the sacred secret now: we shall not all sleep in death.””

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 13 (p. 214)

Death , Secret , Sleep , Appearance

“It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail.”

Abbie Hoffman book Steal This Book

Introduction.
Steal This Book (1971)

“I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

On why he decided against writing proprietary software; quoted in Free as in Freedom : Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software' (2002) by Sam Williams http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/index.html
2000s

Life , Money , People , World

“I'm a perfectionist. I like to get it right. I like to get it good. And you know, writing songs is not -- it's not the kind of thing that you can count on every day. You never know what's going to come or if it's going to come. So you -- you know, it's an uncertain kind of a thing.”

Neil Diamond (1941) American singer-songwriter

Larry King interview (2003)

“"A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" in Language, 35, No. 1 (1959), 26-58. Summation by Noam Chomsky: Rereading this review after eight years, I find little of substance that I would change if I were to write it today. I am not aware of any theoretical or experimental work that challenges its conclusions; nor, so far as I know, has there been any attempt to meet the criticisms that are raised in the review or to show that they are erroneous or ill-founded.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

" A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm," in Leon A. Jakobovits and Murray S. Miron (eds.), Readings in the Psychology of Language, Prentice-Hall, 1967, pp. 142-143.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1960s

Behavior , Change

“The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets. They will either write toward the anthology or away from it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting protective distortions on their work - as parents in old Central Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from compulsory military service.”

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

Laura Riding and Robert Graves, from A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (Doubleday, 1928)

Parent

“I am a terrible writer. You are a great writer. I went to sales school. You have a master’s degree. Put them together and you get a best-selling author’ and a ‘best-writing author.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

School

“I tried to answer but she interrupted and went off in a Barrymore manner, speaking deeply and tragically; murmuring of the pity of it all, the stupidity of it all, the absurdity of a hopelessly bad writer like myself buried in a cheap hotel in Los Angeles, California, of all places, writing banal things the world would never read and never get a chance to forget.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Stupidity , World , Angels , Chance

“The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Pt. 1, Ch. 4
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Literature

“1) Writers who write for other writers should write letters.”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers

“Dad joined the US Army by this point [1964], and initially he was stationed in Texas and then South Carolina. But the Vietnam war brought our normal life to an end. Once again, Dad was gone. Communications were very basic back then: Dad couldn't just pick up a cellphone and let us know he was okay. Months would go by without a letter or anything. Eventually he bought two tape recorders -- one he kept with him and one for our house. Dad used to talk into the recorder and send the tapes home. Then we would gather round our machine and tell Dad stories. And I would sing. I still have all the tapes, but I can't listen to them. It hurts too much. After Dad came back from Nam, he wasn't well. He'd been poisoned by Agent Orange and needed quite a lot of looking after. Mum was busy trying to get her Cuban qualifications revalidated by a US university, so I had to take care of Dad and my little sister [Becky]. It was tough. Toward the end, Dad was too far gone and he didn't really know what was hapening around him. I joined Miami Sound Machine in 1975 and we were getting quite successful, but Dad didn't even know who I was. He had to be moved to the hospital. On my wedding day in 1978 [September 2] I went to visit him, still wearing my wedding dress. That was the last time that he said my name. Dad died in 1980, but he touches my life every day. On my last album [Unwrapped] I did a lot of writing while I was looking at a picture of him in his younger days -- so happy and in the prime of his life. I'm not sure if he sees me, but I can feel him all around me. I hope he knows that I am so very proud of him.”

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

The [London] Sunday Times (November 17, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life , War , Hope , Feeling

“Men are the dominant sign-using animals. Animals other than man do, of course, respond to certain things as signs of something else, but such signs do not attain the complexity and elaboration which is found in human speech, writing, art, testing devices, medical diagnosis, and signaling instruments. Science and signs are inseparably interconnected, since science both presents men with more reliable signs and embodies its results is systems of signs. Human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs - if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 1 (1971:17), Lead paragraph first chapter

Men , Art , Science , Animals

“The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from censuring or pontificating. He will thus avoid doing anything foolish, for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories. p. 327 (1958)
1950s

Dreams , Art , Nature

“So in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking.”

Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (1536–1608) English politician and poet

Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset "On Mr Edward Howard, upon his British Princes"; cited from Geoffrey Grigson (ed.) The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 74
Misattributed

Way , Thinking

“There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

"Conversation with Dos Passos," New Leader, Feb 23 1959

Problem

“The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book II, Chapter 6, p. 302
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

“I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot — we inhale from our Bartlett's.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Speech at Moorpark College, Moorpark, California (December 3, 1968).
Other

Men

“My writing is quantum writing. Do you know of the quantum bullet? The quantum bullet, when it's fired, leaves not one hole but two. That's how my writing is.”

Wilson Harris (1921–2018) Guyanese writer

Interview with Wilson Harris (2010) on being Knighted at Queen Elizabeth II Birthday Honours

“I wanted people who wouldn't become too worried about casualties. One always should be concerned about casualties, but the risk of incurring casualties can't be allowed to affect decisions, unless it's evident casualties will be prohibitively heavy. There may be no safe way to write this.”

Christopher Vokes (1904–1985) Canadian general

England, p. 76
Vokes - My Story (1985)

People , Way , Decision

“Just as there are higher beings who spread spiritual messages throughout the atmosphere by means of books, films, music, and other mass media, there are beings of a demonic nature who try to slow down the progress on this planet through these media. Exposure to books and media of this type can have a negative effect on you. […] To counteract this, some of the beings of a higher nature write books or oversee the writing of books that enhance one’s spiritual development.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 28

Books , Music , Nature

“Amir Khusrau writes that under Jalauddin Khalji (1290-96), after a battle, “whatever live Hindu fell into the hands of the victorious king was pounded to bits under the feet of the elephants. The Musalman captives had their lives spared.””

Amir Khusrow (1253–1325) Indian poet, writer, musician and scholar

Miftah-ul-Futuh (Aligarh text, 1954), p. 22. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4
Miftahu'l-Futuh

Victory

Quotes about writing page 38

Quotes about writing
page 38