Stephanie > Stephanie's Quotes

“Words matter.”
― John Kenney, Truth in Advertising

“The irony of advertising, a communications business, is that we treat words with little respect, devaluing their meaning.”
― John Kenney, Truth in Advertising

“Every writer, of course, has very specific ideas about editors. But writers seldom get the last word on anything.”
― Terry McDonell, The Accidental Life: An Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers

“This sound self-serving, but being interested in everything makes you a more effective opportunist—and that's what an editor has to be, a student of unintended consequences.”
― Terry McDonell, The Accidental Life: An Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers

“Deadlines are a great antidote to insecurity.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“Writing doesn't improve by not doing it.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“A magazine—a relevant one—should be a sound, not an echo.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I love my friends
neither with my heart nor with my mind.

Just in case…
Heart might stop.
Mind can forget.
I love them with my soul.
Soul never stops or forgets.”
― Rumi

“If rock and roll was the common tongue, maybe Rolling Stone could be a translation device.”
― Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

“To maintain momentum, you must rejoice in risk.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“To ride the zeitgeist successfully, you have to know when it has turned.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it’s beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage—oop!—yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel.”
― Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Good writing has a beat. Great writing sounds like jazz.”
― Dana Brown, Dilettante: True Tales of Excess, Triumph, and Disaster

“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that's been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left in the world who shares my memories of our childhood, our parents, our Shanghai, our struggles, our sorrows, and, yes, even our moments of happiness and triumph. My sister is the one person who truly knows me, as I know her. The last thing May says to me is 'When our hair is white, we'll still have our sister love.”
― Lisa See, Shanghai Girls