Quotes by Journalists - Page 99

...If I ever got sloppy and maudlin, it would be for the streets of my childhood—but no self- respecting writer should ever eulogize a slum...
John Geddes
What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
Ernest Hemingway
I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To use a painfully precious metaphor, I need fixed stars to navigate by, otherwise I get lost in the blankness of the page.
Lev Grossman
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Joan Didion
Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
Ben Hecht
...each person is required to ask, 'what is my authority?' - on what do you base your decisions? if it's yourself, then you are without excuse...
John Geddes
...what makes a writer a prophet is his ability to speak truth...
John Geddes
...authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...
John Geddes
The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
George Orwell
I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.
George Orwell
The best kind of day is a writing day
Buffy Andrews
From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
George Orwell
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
Ernest Hemingway
Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.
Ernest Hemingway
No matter how good it is, your book will not sell itself.
Elinor Florence
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Karl Kraus
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303
Lionel Shriver
When I saw you on the stairs before, I’d forgotten how beautiful you are,’ he whispered against her skin.‘Spotty, not beautiful,’ she corrected gently, running her finger along his crooked nose. ‘Now you, you’re beautiful.’‘I even missed your inferiority complex.’ Max smiled and shifted against her.‘Not being inferior. It’s a point of fact. I’m covered in zits,’ Neve said and she didn’t know why she felt the need to share that with Max but then she was glad that she had because he was kissing each one of the angry red bumps along her forehead and chin and cheeks, even though a few of them were starting to suppurate. ‘Don’t do that, it’s completely unhygienic. Kiss my mouth instead.
Sarra Manning
It wasn't a perfect body but it was the body she deserved. Not just from every bar of chocolate or bag of crisps or laden plate of food that she'd eaten. This body was also testament to all the hours in the gym and cycling up hills on her bike and glugging down two litres of water a day and learning to love vegetables and fruits that didn't come as optional extra with a pastry crust. She'd earned this body.This was her body and she had to stop giving it such a hard time.
Sarra Manning
He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself
Djuna Barnes
There was no single gay point of view. Like skin color or gender or any of those arbitrary, sometimes artificial, difference sexual orientation didn't make us all the same. But it did affect us. It had to.
Kelly J. Cogswell
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, None has understood you, but I understand you, None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself, None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you, None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you, I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.
Walt Whitman
Tell me about love when you've been with someone for years, cared for them when they're ill, put up with them when they're miserable or grumpy, taken the sharp side of their tongue and still come back. Tell me about love when you've acted quite appallingly, and the other person has still accepted you.
Mark Chadbourn
I took a breath and watched as he leaned down over my exposed, lumpy belly. Very lightly, he kissed it. He kissed the spot beneath my ribs and all the way down to my navel. He kissed across my lower stomach, that wretched expanse where the stretch marks raked across my skin, then up and down my sides. Harry kissed every inch of my horrible flesh with a tenderness so great and loving, and all the while, my eyes stayed clenched tight. 'I am loved,' a voice inside me declared.
Kelsey Miller
Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.
Sally Brampton
Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are
Jeannette Walls
The MistakeWith the mistake your life goes in reverse.Now you can see exactly what you didWrong yesterday and wrong the day beforeAnd each mistake leads back to something worseAnd every nuance of your hypocrisyTowards yourself, and every excuseStands solidly on the perspective linesAnd there is perfect visibility.What an enlightenment. The colonnadeRolls past on either side. You needn't move.The statues of your errors brush your sleeve.You watch the tale turn back — and you're dismayed.And this dismay at this, this big mistakeIs made worse by the sight of all those whoKnew all along where these mistakes would lead — Those frozen friends who watched the crisis
James Fenton
The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
Maureen Dowd
Be calm. God awaits you at the door.
Gabriel García Márquez
No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.
Sándor Márai
Author says the ineffectual U.S. Navy of two centuries ago lost two thirds as many men to duelist bullets as to sea hazards.
Joseph Wheelan
There's blood pounding through the Duke's head.Knighthood is glory, he's thinking, not just grace in the saddle and at swordplay, but courage enough to give your life to defend what you hold dear. A noble reward, for noble men. A badge of honour.He'd never ennoble a merchant. Even Chaucer, whom he admires, but knows to be a fool on a battlefield. Not Chaucer's fault, that; just his merchant blood.Knighthood's not for the likes of these people; for Madame Perrers' brood. He thought she knew her place. But she's overreached herself; she's as grasping as the rest of them, after all. Do these people think they can buy or steal everything?
Vanora Bennett
Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away
Norman Mailer
I'd start to explain with the outward sheepish and inner pride of the nerd.
Robert Lane Greene
Unchecked pride evolves into swagger, a hypnotizing mask of insecurity that can and does compromise our ability to make progress and attain power. Pride stands in the way of forgiveness and a strategic approach to navigating a chessboard rigged to prevent pawns from becoming kings and queens.
Jason Whitlock
But Dad looked delighted. "My Mia's singing 'Waiting for Vengeance' to my Teddy. What do you think about that?
Gayle Forman
One of the mitigating benefits of children is that they make a Lego habit more respectable.
Jonathan V Last
In the minds of their peers, too often students become caricatures of themselves.
Alexandra Robbins
Studies have shown that, at least among students, popularity equals visibility.
Alexandra Robbins
Being indie means being artistic and finding your own eccentric identity. The name of the game for being an indie kid is to never admit you are one. If you do, it goes against your beliefs against labeling, thus making you a hypocrite.
Alexandra Robbins
if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.
David Brooks
In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:
David Brooks
... there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven't lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don't associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it's just that they are giving themselves a D- rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way.
David Brooks
moral voices can also become sanctimonious bullies.
Nicholas Kristof
Americans would prefer that immigrants do their jobs and then disappear at the end of the day.
George F. Will
I was not born to wait.
Gwenda Bond
Someone else deciding what was too dangerous for me to be involved in or pursue had never stopped me yet.
Gwenda Bond
In the first place , I was removed from all the wickedness of the world here. I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the pride of life. I had nothing to covet; for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying.
Daniel Defoe
Pride of opinion has been responsible for the downfall of more men on Wall Street than any other factor.
Charles Henry Dow
We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march?
John L. O'Sullivan
But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested.
Tahir Shah
I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.
Marcus Garvey
...Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...
John Geddes
Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child
Miguel Syjuco
We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.
Will Storr
The seventh reader interrupts you: "Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death."You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla.
Italo Calvino
Tell the fucking story.
Aleksandar Hemon
A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much.
Christopher Morley
Story!" The dwarf snorted. "You'll be talking about "happily ever after" next. Do we look happy? There's no happily ever after for us. Miserabily ever after, more like.
John Connolly
conversion stories are one of the classic Western narratives about the self.
Kathryn Schulz