The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
Cedite, Romani scriptores; cedite, Graii=--Give place, ye Roman writers; give place, ye Greeks (ironically applied to a pretentious author).
The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.
All immortal writers speak out of their hearts.
As former deputy head of the presidential administration, later deputy prime minister and then assistant to the President on foreign affairs, Surkov has directed Russian society like one great reality show. He claps once and a new political party appears. He claps again and creates Nashi, the Russian equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential prodemocracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square. As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the President is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in. The Ostankino TV presenters, instructed by Surkov, pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for twenty minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly until they are imprinted on the mind. They repeat the great mantras of the era: the President is the President of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the President is an enemy of the great God of “stability.” “Effective manager,” a term quarried from Western corporate speak, is transmuted into a term to venerate the President as the most “effective manager” of all. “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective.” The words trickle into the streets: “Our relationship is not effective” lovers tell each other when they break up. “Effective,” “stability”: no one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is “effective,” but the way Surkov and his puppets use them the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.
The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while among us prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
I am well aware that not being a literary man the presumptuous will think that they have the right to blame me on the ground that I am not a man of letters. Vainglorious people! Know they not that I could make answer as Marius did to the Roman people, and say: They who make a {11} display with the labours of others will not allow me mine? They will say that being unskilled in letters I cannot find true expression for the matters of which I desire to treat; they do not know that in my subjects experience is a truer guide than the words of others, for experience was the teacher of all great writers, and therefore I take her for guide, and I will cite her in all cases.
Discover the timeless advice that the world’s great thinkers, billionaires, writers and businesspeople have to offer.
Great writers and orators are commonly economists in the use of words.
[A] free society should be a proprietary society, in the sense of a wide diffusion of property ownership. A great majority of men and women must have a direct stake in the existing order, and a corresponding interest in its preservation. I do not mean that we should endeavor to return to the days of handicraft and of the individual artisan, as has been suggested by a number of writers. We cannot afford to sacrifice all of the immense benefits of mass production. But we must do all in our power to encourage home ownership, farm ownership and the growth of small business enterprises. [ The Seventeen Million , New York: Macmillan, 1937, p. 52.]
The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor. For an actor to represent a Greek hero it is imperative he should have thoroughly studied those antique statues which have lasted to our day, and mastered the particular grace they exhibited in their postures, whether sitting, standing, or walking. Nor should he make attitude his only study. He should highly develop his mind by an assiduous study of the best writers, ancient and modern, which will enable him not only to understand his parts, but to communicate a nobler coloring to his manners and mien.--_Goethe._
Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the most profound.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite."
If this modesty of the evangelical writers had been simulated, as well as many other traits of a beautiful character, and they had only simulated it to attract observation, even if they had not dared to draw attention to it themselves, they would not have failed to procure friends, who would have remarked on it to their advantage. But as they acted thus without dissimulation, and from perfectly disinterested motives, they pointed it out to no one, and I believe that many points of this kind have never been noticed till now, which is an evidence of how dispassionately all was done.
What is the essence and the life of character? Principle, integrity, independence, or, as one of our great old writers has it, "that inbred loyalty unto virtue which can serve her without a livery."--_Bulwer-Lytton._
If we clear the metaphysical element out of modern literature, we shall find its bulk amazingly diminished, and the claims of the remaining writers, or of those whom we have thinned by this abstraction of their straw-stuffing, much more easily adjusted.
The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds , to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
Because writers have had no knowledge of the science of painting, they have not been able to {61} describe its gradations and parts, and since painting itself does not reveal itself nor its artistic work in words, it has remained, owing to ignorance, behind the sciences mentioned above, but it has thereby lost nothing of its divinity. And truly it is not without reason that men have failed to honour it, because it does honour to itself without the aid of the speech of others, just as do the excellent works of nature. And if the painters have not described the art of painting, and reduced it to a science, the fault must not be imputed to painting and it is no less noble on that account, since few painters profess a knowledge of letters, as their life would not be long enough for them to acquire such knowledge. Therefore we ask, Is the virtue of herbs, stones and plants non-existent because men have been ignorant of it? Certainly not; but we will say that these herbs remained noble in themselves without the aid of human tongues or letters.
When we look back upon human records, how the eye settles upon writers as the main landmarks of the past.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Any writing exposes writers to judgment about the quality of their work and their thought. The closer they get to painful personal truths, the more fear mounts—not just about what they might reveal but about what they might discover should they venture too deeply inside. To write well, however, that’s exactly where we must venture.
_The foundation of our faith._--The heathen religion has no foundation at the present day. We are told that it once had such a foundation by the voice of the oracles, but what are the books which certify this? Are they worthy of credence on account of the virtue of their writers, have they been kept with such care that we may feel certain none have tampered with them?
If a man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers--I say, if he cannot get it out of those writers, he cannot get it out of anything; and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time of every English child to the careful study of the models of English writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is still more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that language with precision, with force, and with art.
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
The most original writers borrowed one from another. Boiardo has imitated Pulci, and Ariosto Boiardo. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbor's, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.--_Voltaire._
That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.
Thou hast described him king of animals, but I would rather say, king of beasts, thou being the greatest--for hast thou not slain them in order that they may give thee their children to glut thy greed with which thou hast striven to make a sepulchre for all animals? And I would say still more if I might speak the whole truth. But let us {47} confine ourselves to human matters, relating one supreme infamy, which is not to be found among the animals of the earth; because among these you will not find animals who eat their young, except when they are utterly foolish (and there are few indeed of such among them), and this occurs only among the beasts of prey, such as the lions, and leopards, panthers, lynxes, cats and the like, which sometimes feed on their young; but thou, besides thy children, dost devour thy father, thy mother, thy brother and thy friends; and not satisfied with this, thou goest forth to hunt on the islands of others, seizing other men and these half naked ... thou fattenest and chasest them down thy own throat. Now does not nature produce enough vegetables for thee to satisfy thyself? And if thou art not content with vegetables, canst thou not by a mixture of them make infinite compounds as Platina wrote, and other writers on food?
If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.
And it is this rational ground of belief which the writers of the Gospels, no less than Paul, and Eginhard, and Fox, so little dream of offering that they would regard the demand for it as a kind of blasphemy.
Full oft have letters caused the writers / To curse the day they were inditers.
~Fame.~--Fame, as a river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off; so exemplary writers depend not upon the gratitude of the world.--_Davenant._
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.--_Lamb._
The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order.
Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike?
Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.--_Gladstone._
(_Translation by J. Bostock, M. D., and H. T. Riley, B. A., with slight alterations._) In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.
Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are, the turbid looks most profound.--_Landor._
Two sorts of writers possess genius; those who think, and those who cause others to think.
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Some writers allege that the stars shine of {157} themselves, saying that if Venus and Mercury did not shine of themselves, when their light comes between them and the sun they would darken as much of the sun as they could hide from our eye; this is false, because it is proved that a dark body placed against a luminous body is enveloped and altogether covered by the lateral rays of the remaining part of that body, and thus remains invisible; as may be proved when the sun is seen through the boughs of a leafless tree at a long distance, the boughs do not hide any portion of the sun from our eyes. The same thing occurs with the above-mentioned planets, which, though they have no light in themselves, do not, as has been said, hide any portion of the sun from our eyes.
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?
as Christian writers from the very beginning (i.e. Paul) have seen, it is part of normal Christian experience that we, too, should be prepared to agonize in prayer as we await our own complete redemption and that of all creation.
Sir, a well-placed dash makes half the wit of our writers of modern humour.
With due lamentation Painting complains that it has been expelled from the liberal arts, because it is the true daughter of nature and is practised by means of the most worthy of the senses. Whence wrongly, O writers, you have excluded painting from the liberal arts, since it not only includes in its range the works of nature, but also infinite things which nature never created.
`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order by staff writers</p> ... The central Superhighway site called ``sunsite.unc.edu'' collapsed in the morning before the release. News about the release had been leaked by a German hacker group, Harmonious Hardware Hackers, who had cracked into the author's computer earlier in the week. They had got the release date wrong by one day, and caused dozens of eager fans to connect to the sunsite computer at the wrong time. ``No computer can handle that kind of stress,'' explained the mourning sunsite manager, Erik Troan. ``The spinning disks made the whole computer jump, and finally it crashed through the floor to the basement.'' Luckily, repairs were swift and the computer was working again the same evening. ``Thank God we were able to buy enough needles and thread and patch it together without major problems.'' The site has also installed a new throttle on the network pipe, allowing at most four clients at the same time, thus making a new crash less likely. ``The book is now in our Incoming folder'', says Troan, ``and you're all welcome to come and get it.'' -- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi> [comp.os.linux.announce]
witness to the apocalyptic power of a new divinity. Their conviction results
from something deeper than mere gratitude for the computer's conveniences.
Every new medium of writing brings about new intensities of religious belief
and new schisms among believers. In the 16th century the printed book helped
make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants. In the 20th
century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as a farce.
Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM
PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult
holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it
is itself the one hope for salvation.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
A serious public debate about the validity of astrology? A serious believer in the White House? Two of them? Give me a break. What stifled my laughter is that the image fits. Reagan has always exhibited a fey indifference toward science. Facts, like numbers, roll off his back. And we've all come to accept it. This time it was stargazing that became a serious issue....Not that long ago, it was Reagan's support of Creationism....Creationists actually got equal time with evolutionists. The public was supposed to be open-minded to the claims of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were scientific colleagues....It has been clear for a long time that the president is averse to science...In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly American turf....But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science easily turns into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even nonsense. The same people who doubt experts can also believe any quackery, from the benefits of laetrile to eye of newt to the movement of planets. We lose the capacity to make rational -- scientific -- judgments. It's all the same. -- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company-Washington Post Writers</p> Group
All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
One of your most ancient writers, a historian named Herodotus, tells of a thief who was to be executed. As he was taken away he made a bargain with the king: in one year he would teach the king's favorite horse to sing hymns. The other prisoners watched the thief singing to the horse and laughed. "You will not succeed," they told him. "No one can." To which the thief replied, "I have a year, and who knows what might happen in that time. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die. And perhaps the horse will learn to sing. -- "The Mote in God's Eye", Niven and Pournelle
Rules for Writers: Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. Don't use no double negatives. Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed. No sentence fragments. Avoid commas, that are unnecessary. Eschew dialect, irregardless. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. Hyphenate between sy-llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens. Write all adverbial forms correct. Don't use contractions in formal writing. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies. If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'"
The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much merriment. It is not funny. Astrological gibberish, which means astrology generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government. Unlike comics, which are part of a newspaper's harmless pleasure and make no truth claims, astrology is a fraud. The idea that it gets a hearing in government is dismaying. -- George Will, Washing Post Writers Group
There is always one thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out. -- Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"
`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order by staff writers</p> Helsinki, Finland, August 6, 1995 -- In a surprise movement, Lars ``Lasu'' Wirzenius today released the 0.3 edition of the ``Linux System Administrators' Guide''. Already an industry non-classic, the new version sports such overwhelming features as an overview of a Linux system, a completely new climbing session in a tree, and a list of acknowledgements in the introduction. The SAG, as the book is affectionately called, is one of the corner stones of the Linux Documentation Project. ``We at the LDP feel that we wouldn't be able to produce anything at all, that all our work would be futile, if it weren't for the SAG,'' says Matt Welsh, director of LDP, Inc. The new version is still distributed freely, now even with a copyright that allows modification. ``More dough,'' explains the author. Despite insistent rumors about blatant commercialization, the SAG will probably remain free. ``Even more dough,'' promises the author. The author refuses to comment on Windows NT and Windows 96 versions, claiming not to understand what the question is about. Industry gossip, however, tells that Bill Gates, co-founder and CEO of Microsoft, producer of the Windows series of video games, has visited Helsinki several times this year. Despite of this, Linus Torvalds, author of the word processor Linux with which the SAG was written, is not worried. ``We'll have world domination real soon now, anyway,'' he explains, ``for 1.4 at the lastest.'' ... -- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi> [comp.os.linux.announce]