Writers' Words of Wisdom

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
--Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

* * *

"No one who cannot halt at self-imposed boundaries could ever write."
--Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711)

* * *

"The paragraph is a great art form. I'm very interested in paragraphs and I write paragraphs very, very, carefully."
--Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

* * *

"I portray men as they ought to be portrayed, but Euripides portrays them as they are"
--Sophocles (c. 495-406 BC said by Aristotle with credit given to Sophocles as the source of the quote.)

* * *

“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive.” — Albert Einstein

* * *

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrans, argue not concerning GOD, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults yourn own soul, and your flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body . . . ." Walt Whitman

* * *

"We pursue art for the metaphor--those fragments of spark and smoke, that, when reassembled into new constellations of perceptions, present images of our self we never knew existed." Ray Bradbury

* * *

"Be Specific. Don't say "fruit." Tell what kind of fruit--"It is a pomegranate." Give things the dignity of their names. Just as with human beings, it is rude to say, "Hey, girl, get in line." That girl has a name. (As a matter of fact, if she's at least twenty years old, she is a woman, not a "girl" at all.) Things, too, have names. It is much better to say "the geranium in the window" than "the flower in the window." Geranium--that one word--gives us a much more specific picture. It penetrates more deeply into the beingness of that flower. It immediately gives us the beingness of that flower. It immediately gives us the scene by the window--red petals, green circucular leaves, all straining toward sunlight....Learn the names of everything: birds, cheese, tractors, cars, buildings. A writer is all at once everything--an architect, French cook, farmer--and at the same time, a writer is none of these things."--Natalie Goldberg

* * *

“Real courage is when you know you are licked before you begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”—From To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee

* * *

"...to become world citizens we must not simply amass knowlege; we must also cultivate in ourselves a capacity for sympathetic imagination that will enable us to comprehend the motives and choices of people different from ourselves, seeing them not as forbiddingly alien and other, but as sharing many problems and possibilites with us....Here the arts play a vital role, cultivating powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship." From "The Narative Imagination" by Martha C. Nussbaum

* * *

"Far before human art and industry is the imagaination." --Joe Imperiale (from a brain fart he had on Friday, November 25, 2005 at 11:50 a.m.)

* * *

"I go to parties in my head. There's a party all the time there. Sometimes the neighbors up there complain, so I try to turn down the music, but I can't because there are no knobs there."--author unknown

* * *

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon."--Chris Rock putting 2005 into perspective

*If you have wisdom concerning writing

that is supportive of our efforts to become better writers, please post it.