“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Albert Einstein
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
He who writes and runs away lives to write another day.
apologies to Tacitus
Perfection is achieved, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Terre des Hommes, III; “’Avion”, (1939)
The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody’s best friend and only true enemy – the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer is a rebel who never stops.
William Saroyan, The William Saroyan Reader (1958)
A writer cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
Albert Camus
Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
Carl Sandburg
Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
G.K. Chesterton, Twelve Types (1903) Charles II
I started to sense that words not only convey something, but are something; that words have color, depth, texture of their own, and the power to evoke vastly more than they mean … to make things happen inside the one who reads or hears them.
Frederick Buechner
Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.
Wendell Berry, A Warning to My Readers, from The Country of Marriage (1973)
The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probably that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.
Mark Twain, on pre-Columbian explorers of America
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde
I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.
Mark Twain, “Wearing White Clothes” speech, 1907
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
Garrison Keillor
It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.
Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), 7th President of the United States
All generalizations, including this one, are false.
Mark Twain
The poets are wrong of course. … But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
William Cuthbert Faulkner, The Town, 1957
In this footnote we are again going to misapply an oversimplified relation to get an estimate that will be dressed up to look as though it said something about the real world. Freehand improvising of this sort is one of the essential tools of the planner. If you can do it rapidly and at the same time maintain a convincing air, you can persuade any untrained person that you have said something. If you become sufficiently skilled, you can even fool the slower witted of your colleagues for an hour or two.
(with apologies) Kinsman, Wind Waves
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.
Albert Einstein, quoted in the SciFi Channel series “Eureka”
Snoopy: “Woof!
Linus: “’Woof’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Snoopy (thinking): “I don’t know… It’s just something everyone in our family always said.”
Charles Schultz in “Peanuts”, The Philadelphia Enquirer, May 30, 1996
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