Writing Quotes - Page 17

The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.

We had a teacher, named Mr. Brown, and he was writing something on the board once - he was writing something on the board, and he farted. And you would have thought kids had seen the face of God. Kids weren't even laughing; they were just sitting there screaming, just screaming. Kids had to get carted out; kids were screaming. Kids had to get carted out, and they were going to the nurses' office. Kids are crying in the hallway. 'Oh, this is our 9/11.' And it was. It was their 9/11 'cause they never thought anything like that could ever happen.

I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.

Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand...is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everybody liked, they left that to the Bee Gees.

Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously, these people could express themselves only with their friends or at the bar after two or three glasses of something, and they said every silliness, and people laughed. Now they have the possibility to show up on the internet. And so, on the internet, along with the messages of a lot of interesting and important people - even the Pope is writing on Twitter - we have a great quantity of idiots.

You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one.

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that.

Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!

There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them.

Anyone who writes an autobiographical work at the age of 34 is, at best, presumptuous. It occurred to me that it was time to set the record straight.

For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.

The chief virtue that language can have is clarity.