Sean > Sean's Quotes

“…what matters is not complexity or decoration but rather intelligibility, grace, and the fact that the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express…”
― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“Character is plot, plot is character.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.”
― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

“In any case, it is neither the responsibility nor the purpose of art to make us better human beings. And it’s no wonder that art that takes on this solemn task so often winds up being didactic, preachy, cloying, and less effective than art with a less exalted notion of its purpose.”
― Francine Prose, What to Read and Why: Illuminating Essays on Literature, Language, and the Craft of Writing by a Distinguished Critic

“Conversely, bad writers often write in order to forward a cause or enlarge other people’s understanding of a contemporary social issue. Any attempt to write fiction in order to make the world a better, fairer place is almost certain to fail.”
― Toby Litt

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“learn the rules like a professional, so you can break them like an artist.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.”
― Toby Litt

“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.”
― Rebecca West, The Book Of Military Quotations

“You can't get a suit of armour and a rubber chicken just like that. You have to plan ahead.”
― Michael Palin

“…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death

“The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care”
― Emily Dickinson

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“Don't confuse honours with achievement.”
― Zadie Smith

“Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”
― Steve Martin

“It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.”
― Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

“The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.”
― Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

“When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn’t, but also that they couldn’t. They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon.”
― Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

“Years later, while imprisoned as coalition detainees, some of Zarqawi’s senior lieutenants described the AQI leader’s desire to incite a global sectarian war by comparing him to the Joker, Heath Ledger’s character in the 2008 movie, “The Dark Knight,” whose central desire was “to watch the world burn.”30”
― United States Government US Army, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War Volume 1: Invasion Insurgency Civil War 2003 – 2006