"I believe that real friends love you to no limit, I believe that real change lies in the mirror." - Wale in "Change"
As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent. ~Socrates
It only took twelve years to go from 'Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer' to 'Ein Führer, ein Bunker, ein Luger.' -an old friend of mine
Break bread wit the enemy But no matter how many cats I break bread with I'll break who you sendin' me - DMX
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Michelangelo (?) was reported to have said about one of his sculptures that the lion was already in the stone, he simply removed everything that wasn't lion. Something like that.
Yeah, but he was working with quarried stone - the raw material was there already. A writer has no raw material to start with. His first job is to gather all his material - to write all his raw material from nothing - before he can begin to look for the lion in it all. If that analogy holds. Alternatively, because a writer knows he wants his lion when he begins, he may simply gather his clay fingerful by fingerful and build his lion out of that - he can work by accumulating and not by chiseling away, so to speak. Start with the Library of Congress and edit away anything that isn't your novel, or start with the alphabet and assemble your novel. Take your pick.
I've seriously been considering including this one in a dating site profile, if only to kind of go ahead and get the fact of my suckiness out of the way: “I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I'm just a different kind of fun; the kind that leaves one bereft of hope; the kind of fun that ends in tears.” -David Rakoff
“As to the kind of truth one finds in books, it is a truth that enables us sometimes to discern what things are not, without ever enabling us to discover what they are.” Anatol France - The Revolt of the Angels.
"He was stopping, and I was coming in his behind, so I tootled him. He was still stopping, so I tootled him again vigorously, again and again, until he started to moving." -an older student of mine, years ago Spoiler: Translation from beginners' English to American: The car in front of me was stopped, so I beeped my horn. It didn't moved, so I blew the horn again, several times, until it moved.
"I don't believe writers are any smarter than anyone else, they're just more articulate in their stupidity." - David Foster Wallace “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” - Charles Bukowski
"Her body is in a hellacious state of discombobulation!" - Stone Cold Steve Austin, commenting on an exhausted competitor in his Broken Skull Challenge
"I had noticed earlier in my life, especially after meeting people who were regarded as 'legends' that what is called charisma, this outsize attractive power, was often rooted in madness. We experienced these people as extraordinary because deep psychic disturbances prevented them from observing the same boundaries the rest of us had learned to adhere to." - Scot Turow, Testimony
I don't know if this was in the book (never read it) but it was in the film, First Knight. I think it's a great quote that if you think about it opens up a huge amount of very controversial discussion. King Arthur: Either what we hold to be right, and good, and true IS right and good and true for all mankind under God, or we're just another robber tribe.
That's a very good quote, but I hope you'll understand that I mean no criticism of you when I mention that I haven't thought of that movie in years, and gods how I hated it....
