 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
|
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
So difficult
it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we
have nothing else but words to do it with. A living language
is like a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what
it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other
tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die. Writing is
like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights,
but you make the whole trip that way. There are
some things so serious you have to laugh at them. The sun, with
all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still
ripen a bunch of grapes as it if had nothing else in the universe to
do. Words are
chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment. Wilkommen,
bienvenue, welcome, c'mon in... The reverse
side also has a reverse side. The only gift
is giving to the poor; / All else is exchange. Easy reading
is damned hard writing. Sometimes
I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not.
In either case, the idea is quite staggering. We allow our
ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone,
alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Why should
I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why If the gods
listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly A committee
is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. Nature is
trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us.
We are not the only experiment. The poet judges
not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a The instinct
of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to There are
times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth,
just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in
broad daylight. I have suffered
from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot
more if I had been understood. Nothing fixes
a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. What you are
thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. The decent
moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the
time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the
good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a
number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded
that they should burn none at all. Letter writing
is the only device for combining solitude with good company. And the day
came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful
than the risk it took to blossom. Art is a house
that tries to be haunted. Writing is
the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something
else. Nobody can
make you feel inferior without your permission. Not that the
story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. Do not write
merely to be understood, write so that you cannot possibly be misunderstood. No passion
in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft. An author's
greatest fear is to appear, as a result of revision, less than brilliant.
The good editor convinces authors that without revision their genius
will be obscured. The difference
between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that
between lightning and the lightning bug. I am sorry
for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short
one. When something
can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. If everyone
who wrote would put himself in his reader's shoes, at least for a time,
then we'd all write a little better and walk a little easier. Becoming
the reader is the essence of becoming a writer. When I say
writing, O, believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.
Don't worry
about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. There are
a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he
takes up a pen to write. "You'd
better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like
being drunk." Anyone who
is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account
be allowed to do the job.
There is a
theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe
is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced
by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. Paranoids
are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because
they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid
situations. Doctor how
can you diagnose someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and then
act like I had some choice about barging in here right now? I object,
your honor! This trial is a travesty. It's a travesty of a mockery of
a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. I wash born
here, an I wash raished here, and dad gum it, I am gonna die here, an
no sidewindin bushwackin, hornswaglin, cracker croaker is gonna rouin
me bishen cutter. No Trespassing
- 4 / 17ths of a Haiku. The human
race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. By doing just
a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm
me. The last thing
one knows in constructing a work is what to put first. You can't
have everything... where would you put it? When anyone
says "theoretically," they really mean "not really." I never let
my schooling get in the way of my education. A word is
not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living
thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used. It was cold
out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal
cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors,
happy as lambs in the spring. We don't just
borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down
alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new
vocabulary. No man means
all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery
and thought is viscous. For your born
writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon
the right word. Words are,
of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Moses dragged
us through the desert to the one place in the Middle East where there
is no oil. I think every
woman is entitled to a middle husband she can forget. Pursuit and
seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle. Do not blame
God for having created the tiger, but thank him for not having given
it wings. He who asks
is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. If you believe
everything you read, better not read. Praise the
young and they will blossom The church
is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I'll walk carefully.
I notice that
you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That
is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way.
Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When
you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill
most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they
are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An
adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon
a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice. Wrinkles should
merely indicate where the smiles have been. Even Noah
got no salary for the first six months--partly on account of the weather
and partly because he was learning navigation. Experience
is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts
the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes. The time to
begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.
By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is
that you really want to say. It is no use
to keep private information which you can't show off. To get the
right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the
diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single
sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody
can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering
a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering
paragraph. I wrote a
few children's books... Not on purpose. I was going
70 miles an hour and got stopped by a cop who said, "Do you know
the speed limit is 55 miles per hour?" "Yes, officer, but
I wasn't going to be out that long..." When I was
a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only
child... eventually. Women might
be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships. Women need
a reason to have sex.... Men just need a place. On the one
hand, we'll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open
all our own jars. I put instant
coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time. How beautiful
it is to do nothing, and then rest afterwards. A mathematician
is a device for turning coffee into theorems. We're going
to turn this team around 360 degrees. Christ died
for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing
them? Some mornings,
it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps. Sometimes
I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should
live next door and just visit now and then. Beware of
any enterprise that requires new clothing. When I got
to the top of Everest, I was tired. Let us endeavour
to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Opportunity
is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks
like work. Of course
the people don't want war ...that is understood. But, after all, it
is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always
a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a
fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. You think
your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world,
but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that
tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people
who were alive, or who have ever been alive. I hate mankind,
for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired It is not
only true that the language we use puts words in our mouths; it also
puts notions in our heads. In all of
us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers
out in sleep. There are
10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only
a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call
them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
Works of imagination
should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative
they are the more necessary it is to be plain. The gem cannot
be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
Danger and
delight grow on one stalk. When one tugs
at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the
world. A man's ethical
behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social
ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor
way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward
after death. You cannot
simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. Only two things
are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about
the former. I know not
with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will
be fought with sticks and stones. God doesn't
play dice. Imagination
is more important than knowledge. He who joyfully
marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He
has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord
would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away
with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country
stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable an ignorable war
is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action!
It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but
an act of murder. Washing one's
hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to
side with the powerful, not to be neutral. Him that I
love, I wish to be free -- even from me. An ounce of
mother is worth a pound of clergy. His mother
had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences
of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even
more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well
better take the action that would create it. Please subdue
the anguish of your soul. Nobody is destined only to happiness or to
pain. The wheel of life takes one up and down by turn. God, to me,
it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper. You become
writer by writing. It is a yoga. |
|||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|
|||||||||||||