Writing Quotes - page 99
It is not enough to "have" free speech. People must learn to speak freely. Noam Chomsky remarked in the sixties about the short-life ultra-radicals on campus who thought that Marx should have been burning down the British Museum rather than writing and thinking in it. The less political descendants of that faction have now tried to reduce life to a system of empowerment etiquette, and have wasted a lot of their own time and everyone else's in the process. But the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by the everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics, and not by the awkward handful who imagine themselves revolutionaries.
Christopher Hitchens
Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus; that was, indeed, the only way in which it could make Him live. But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.
Albert Schweitzer
I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.
Helen Garner
I have never looked like being in that incredible virtuoso class like, say, Stan Getz. I think people made a mistake and put me in that embryonic class when I was very young and thought that I was going to branch out to be a big instrumentalist in some way or another. But I always find that I very, very seldom get anywhere near what I consider a satisfactory standard. I would much rather be judged for my writing because writing is a thing that you can have second thoughts about and, if it isn't right, you can't blame somebody else but yourself.
John Dankworth
Writing the history of the present is always a very different thing from writing the history of the distant past. The history of the distant past depends entirely on literary and documentary sources; the history of the present always involves unwritten material as well as documents. But the difference was much greater in the days of Thucydides than it is now.
J. B. Bury
The Achaeans of north Greece, which was later to be called Thessaly, seem to have been the great sea-adventurers of the heroic age. With this country were connected the memories of early Greek exploration of the Euxine, in the legend of the ship Argo. And to the Achaeans of Thessaly we must probably refer the earliest notice which preserves the Achaean name in a historical document. An Egyptian writing tells us that they came in company with other peoples "from the lands of the sea" and invaded Egypt in the year 1229 B. C., when Memptah was king. But the great achievement which made the Achaeans illustrious was one in which southern and northern Greece combined-the expedition against Troy.
J. B. Bury
It is in this way that all my books have been composed. They were always written at least twice over; a first draft of the entire work was completed to the very end of the subject, then the whole begun again de novo; but incorporating, in the second writing, all sentences and parts of sentences of the old draft, which appeared as suitable to my purpose as anything which I could write in lieu of them. I have found great advantages in this system of double redaction. It combines, better than any other mode of composition, the freshness and vigour of the first conception, with the superior precision and completeness resulting from prolonged thought. In my own case, moreover, I have found that the patience necessary for a careful elaboration of the details of composition and expression, costs much less effort after the entire subject has been once gone through, and the substance of all that I find to say has in some manner, however imperfect, been got upon paper.
John Stuart Mill
In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field.
Kenneth Boulding
Knowledge is not something which exists and grows in the abstract. It is a function of human organisms and of social organization. Knowledge, that is to say, is always what somebody knows: the most perfect transcript of knowledge in writing is not knowledge if nobody knows it. Knowledge however grows by the receipt of meaningful information - that is, by the intake of messages by a knower which are capable of reorganising his knowledge.
Kenneth Boulding
The essence of what I have learned about writing and performing music is the authenticity you are faced with in your day-to-day work. No matter what other people or even critics will say, you have to follow your own direction which not necessarily has to be a straight line to success; sometimes it will be a curly, dramatic curve you have to go, but that's the only way to leave a little landmark of brave respect to others and to the dimensions of your own capability.
Edgar Froese
Writing music for a picture means you have to compromise with a given reference to a movie or the advice coming from the director and producer. Working on your own material, you have to be just authentic with yourself, following your subjective perspectives and ideas. There is no-one who will judge what you are doing as long as you are in the composing process. Both ways are very different but can support your input learning about the musical universe immensely.
Edgar Froese
I was planning on writing a detailed review of several books on web security tonight, but the Obama collapse has superseded my best-laid plans. Here's another open thread for this important topic, as America wrestles with the issue of whether it would be a good idea to elect a President with a 20-year history of associating with people who hate America.
Charles Foster Johnson
Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Stephen Leacock
