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“Don't wait for the muse. As I've said, he's a hardheaded guy who's not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn't the Ouija board or the spirit-world we're talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine 'til noon. or seven 'til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up.”
― On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
― On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.”
― God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
― God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
― The Picture of Dorian Gray
― The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”
― Self-Reliance and Other Essays
― Self-Reliance and Other Essays
“The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.”
― On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
― On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Books I Loathed
— 1956 members
— last activity Jul 05, 2026 05:52AM
This is a public forum for people to kvetch (cleanly, please) about books they absolutely hated, and for others to respond. Though nonfiction is certa ...more
Tony’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Tony’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
4,042 books
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1,454 friends
537 books
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520 friends
1,618 books
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71 friends
1,196 books
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77 friends
440 books
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149 friends
45 books
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78 friends
803 books
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119 friends
245 books
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23 friends
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