My favorite quotes:
“Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.” – Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing
“Just because there’s a continuation doesn’t mean there isn’t stagnation.” – Lindsey Tucker
“I am always the funny one, the strange one, the tiny one. I want you to assume one of these thankless roles.” – Beryl Parmenter, from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let’s not say men. Let’s say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.” – Don DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel
“When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won’t do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years – the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.” – Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
“He would need to do serious gymwork once he started his job, days away now. It was no good spending eight hours at the office, ten hours, then going straight home. He would need to burn things off, test his body, direct himself inward, working on his strength, stamina, agility, sanity. He would need an offsetting discipline, a form of controlled behavior, voluntary, that kept him from shambling into the house and hating everybody.” – Don DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel
“Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.” – Don DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel
“Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.” — Banksy
“Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It’s an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.” – Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing
“There’s a certain man, an archetype, he’s a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you’re going to marry.” – Don DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel
“The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you’re doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?” – The Journals of Ayn Rand
“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” – William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” – William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)” – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“He barely noticed himself talking. That was the interesting part. The more he spoke, the more he felt he was softly split in two.” – from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“He talks least of all to the fourth passenger, his cabin mate, a boy just out of high school and on his way to France to study French. He is a Texas boy and just close enough to Lee outwardly to be the world’s preferred version of the type. It’s like the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path.” – from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“You have to leave them with coincidence, lingering mystery. This is what makes it real.” – from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it. Create a loneliness that beats with violent desire. This kind of man. An arrest, a false name, a stolen credit card. Stalking a victim can be a way of organizing one’s loneliness, making a network out of it, a fabric of connections. Desperate men give their solitude a purpose and a destiny.” – from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“He knows he’s strange but can’t help it.” – from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.” – from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.” — Banksy
“Unknowing, partly knowing, nodding but not saying, the boy had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all.”– from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.” – The Journals of Ayn Rand
“Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.” – The Journals of Ayn Rand
A “collective” mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent – who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly that the “whole’s” verdict – we don’t get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind. – The Journals of Ayn Rand
“Men demonstrate their courage far more often in little things than in great.” – Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
“There are many who think that they are marvelous if they can simply resemble a great man in some one thing; and often they seize only on the defect he has.” – Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
“The more things I threw away, the more I found.” – Don DeLillo, White Noise
“A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.” – Machiavelli, The Discourses
“There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.” – Machiavelli, The Discourses
“We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.” – Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
“No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.” – Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
“Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.” – Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
“The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.” – Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
“If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.” – from Libra, by Don DeLillo
“She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.” – from Libra, by Don DeLillo