Posts tagged Birthdays

Ursula K. Le Guin - 1929

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

Arthur Rimbaud - 1854

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!

John Le Carre - 1931

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. 

Rick Moody - 1961

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

Katherine Mansfield - 1888

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, you can’t build on it it’s only good for wallowing in.

Ann Petry - 1908

The first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street.

Elmore Leonard - 1925

Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing :

1. Never open a book with weather. 
2. Avoid prologues. 
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. 
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely. 
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. 
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” 
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. 
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. 

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. 

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Claude Simon - 1913

For me, the big chore is always the same: how to begin a sentence, how to continue it, how to complete it. 

David Brin - 1950

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It’s happened many times in the past. It could happen to us. 

Clive Barker - 1952

Gather experience… Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.

Gore Vidal - 1925

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. 

Tahar Ben Jelloun - 1944

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It’s not very funny, but it’s sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.

Jonathan Swift - 1667

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

Louisa May Alcott - 1832

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.