As previously mentioned, I like quotes. It’s as if I think that by merely knowing what someone intelligent said, I will become just as intelligent as they. Only I’m not intelligent enough to remember any of the things that they actually said, which is why I have to write them down. Here are my most recent finds, the majority of which I’ve lifted from the brilliant @ommwriter’s twitter stream (for ‘majority’ read ‘all’) – I suggested they make a page of them ages ago, they haven’t yet, so I’ve made my own.
Some are funny. Some are true. Some are familiar – although who remembers who first said “Less is more”? Really? Liar. Some are inspiring, but I left most of those out because most ‘inspiring’ things make me cringe. All entertained me though. Lookout for the one by Truman Capote, whose way with words was almost as inspired his taste in home furnishings (see above). The one from Popular Mechanics is also very insightful.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“What’s the sense of living if you’re not learning.” – Chiquira Carrasca
“Less is more.” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” – Maria Robinson
“Music is love in search of a word.” – Sidney Lanier
“Imagine more. Think less.” – unknown
“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow…” – Lawrence Clark Powell
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E. L. Doctorow
“Writing is both mask and unveiling.” – E.B. White
“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” – Edwin Schlossberg
“Writing well means never having to say, ‘I guess you had to be there.’” – Jef Mallett
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” – Popular Mechanics, 1949
“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.” – Richard Harding Davis
“Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.” – Catherine O’Hara
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” -Ernest Hemingway
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” – Tom Clancy
“A dose of poison can do its work only once, but a bad book can go on poisoning people’s minds for any length of time.” – Stud Terkel
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us” – Franz Kafka
“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard
“The human mind is like umbrella. It functions best when open.” – Max Gropius
“Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.” – Noam Chomsky
“Some stories are true that never happened.” – Elie Weisel
“I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” – Henri Matisse
“It [creativity] is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – Doctorow
“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann
“It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.” – Andrew Jackson
“There is no method except to be very intelligent.” – T. S. Eliot
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” – Truman Capote
“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.” – Cormac McCart
“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.”- Nadine Gordimer
“If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” – Kingsley Amis
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov
“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus
“Other people’s interruptions of your work are relatively insignificant compared with the countless times you interrupt yourself.” – B. Francis
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” – Cyril Connolly
