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He believed in a door. He must find that door.
The door was the way to. . .to. . .
The Door was The Way.
Good.
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't
have a good answer to.
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-Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
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*That is
the possibility all of us live with. We sit there alone, pounding out the
words, with our heart pounding in time. Each sentence brings with it a
sickening sensation of not being right. Each page keeps us wondering if
we are moving in the wrong direction.
Even if, for some reason, we feel we are getting it
right and that the whole thing is singing with operatic clarity, we are
going to come back to it the next day and reread it and hear only a duck's
quacking.
It's torture for every one of us.
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-Isaac Asimov
Gold: The Final Science Fiction
Collection, 1995
Part Three: On Writing Science Fiction
"What Writers Go Through", 1981
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*But suppose that no
matter how you try, you can't seem to absorb the lesson. Well, it may be
that you're not a writer. It's no disgrace. You can always go on to take
up some slightly inferior profession like surgery or the presidency of the
United States. It won't be as good, of course; but we can't all scale the
heights.
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-Isaac Asimov
Gold: The Final Science Fiction
Collection, 1995
Part Two: On Science Fiction
"Hints", 1979
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*Editors don't reject
writers; they reject pieces of paper that have been typed on. Ed.
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-Isaac Asimov
Gold: The Final Science Fiction
Collection, 1995
Part Three: On Writing Science Fiction
"Religion and Science Fiction", 1984
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*. . . [S]ubstance of matter
is better than beauty of words. . .
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-Francis Bacon
Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning,
Divine and Human, 1605
The First Book, IV, 5
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A good writer is not necessarily a good book
critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
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-Jim Bishop
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*When a poet is poor,
half of his divine fruits and fancies miscarry by reason of his anxious
cares to win his daily bread.
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-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Postscript to his
Journey to Parnassus, 1614
Walter Starkie, trans.
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Writing a book is an adventure. To begin
with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it
becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just
as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster,
and fling him to the public.
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-Winston Churchill
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I have always believed that writing
advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first,
of course, is ransom notes . . . .
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-Philip Dusenberry
Qtd. in Eric Clark's The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising,
1988
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I am seldom interested in what he [Ezra
Pound] is saying, but only in the way he says it.
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-T. S. Eliot
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The tools I need for my trade are paper,
tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
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-William Faulkner
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All the fun's in how you say a thing.
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-Robert Frost
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Your manuscript is both good and original;
but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original
is not good.
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-Samuel Johnson
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Eloquence aids in the quick and elegant
comprehension of an idea without prolonged reflection.
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-Eli Khamarov
On Thinking
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*Kings are only men, and
whatever iron cannot achieve against them, words can.
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-Djeli Mamoudou Kouyaté, as told to D.T. Niane
Sundiata : An Epic of Old Mali, 1960
"Soumaoro Kanté, the Sorcerer King"
G.D. Pickett, trans., 1965
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*The best manner of
presenting nothing still makes it remain nothing.
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Kenneth MacGowan (film producer and director),
May 18, 1934
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 1, "Arrival in America to We the Living (1926-1937)"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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*It is only the completely
mediocre writer who never entertains any doubts on the value of his work.
The man of talent is always more severe with his own writing than any
outside critic could ever be.
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Channing Pollock (drama critic, author, and
playwright), June 8, 1941
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 2, "We The Living to The Fountainhead (1937-1943)"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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*Don't ever believe the
stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of
joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do
it. All the authors know that it can't be done. What an author actually
does is this: he observes real life, deduces the abstract principles behind
certain actions or characters, and then creates his own characters out of
the abstraction. The resemblance to real people is one of principle---not
of literal, personal copying.
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Gerald James (a fan), August 18,1945
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 6, "The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged Years (1945-1959)"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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*The method of romantic
realism is to make life more beautiful and interesting than it actually
is, yet give it all the reality, and even a more convincing reality than
that of our everyday existence. Life, not as it is, but as it could be
and should be.
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Henry Blanke (producer of The Fountainhead
movie), December 6,1945
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 6, "The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged Years (1945-1959)"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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*A good story is like a
beautiful body. A beautiful body is beautiful to any audience in any day,
age or century; the only thing that changes is the fashion in clothing.
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Henry Blanke (producer for The Fountainhead
movie), February 26,1949
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 6, "The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged Years (1945-1959)"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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*Do you call the fact that
my book benefited readers "altruistic"? Do you mean that they deprived
from it greater benefits than I did, spiritual or material? Do you mean
that their benefit was achieved at the expense of mine or at the price of
some sort of self-sacrifice by me? Do you mean that I wrote it for their
sake, not mine? Do you mean that I wrote it for the purpose of benefiting
them, with no personal interest involved in the matter? Or do you mean that
in order to be selfish, I had to expect my book to harm people---but
since it didn't, this makes me an altruist?
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Robert Spencer Carr (science fiction author),
January 23,1949
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 6, "The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged Years (1945-1959)"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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*The pressure disappeared
with the first word he put on paper. He thought---while his hand moved
rapidly---what power there was in words; later, for those who heard them,
but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the
breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists
have never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when
a thought takes shape in words.
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-Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, 1943
Part Four : Howard Roark, Ch. 15
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*You may tell the Du Ponts
that they and I have something in common: I deal in explosives, too.
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-Ayn Rand
Private correspondence to Isabel Paterson (author of
The God of the Machine, and a friend),
August 28, 1945
Letters of Ayn Rand, 1995
Chapter 5, "Letters to Isabel Paterson"
Michael S. Berliner, ed.
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*Writing is perhaps the
greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant
epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter XI, "The Persistence of Memory"
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Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
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-John Sheffield
"Essay on Poetry"
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The best emotions to write out of are anger
and fear or dread. . . .The least energizing emotion to write out of is
admiration . . .because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a
passive contemplative mood.
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-Susan Sontag
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I love being a writer. What I can't stand is
the paperwork.
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-Peter De Vries
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The pen is mightier than the sword.
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-Unknown
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Copying off of one source is plagiarism.
Copying from a lot of sources is research.
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-Unknown
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*Harmful literature is
more useful than useful literature, for it is antientropic, it is a means
of combating calcification. . . . It is utopian, absurd. . . . It is right
150 years later.
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-Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Soviet Heretic: Esssays by Yegeny Zamyatin, 1972
"On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters"
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*Let my notes, like the
most sensitive seismograph, record the curve of even the most insignificant
vibrations of my brain.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Fifth Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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