Writing Less Quotes & Sayings

I write for the love of writing, and to tell a story, nothing more, nothing less. — Ron Parham

We say, "Well, the only answer is ... " or, "If you would just ... " Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don't see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don't think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction. — Frank Herbert

Serenity barely heard the last of his words as he made his way out of the cabin. Instead, her attention was on the quick, clean strokes of Morgan's writing. It amazed her that a pirate would be literate. Especially one sold so young to the sea.
She broke the seal.
I feel like a weed in the midst of Winter. 'Tis the sunshine of your smile that will bring back the Spring of my days. We arrive in four days. I hope you will grace me again with your presence.
Yours,
Morgan
She traced the flowing letters with the tip of her finger and couldn't suppress a smile. A poetic pirate no less. Who would have thought? — Kinley MacGregor

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.
Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next. — Pat Conroy

The action of the child inventing a new game with his playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for the meat, a young author writing his first novel; all of these are in terms of definition, Creative, and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less Creative. — Carl Rogers

I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too. — Nick Hornby

Books that take us to an exotic place and never let the grit of that place get under our fingernails...are far less successful. One leaves the places of the book and never feels like one's really gotten one's imaginative passport stamped. — Andrew Lazo

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true. — James Surowiecki

So the aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish under-represented writing, which is an intersection of original language, style, content, and often its author's gender. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous. — Deborah Smith

I do less of that stuff now because I figured out that when I was writing things I didn't care about, it made me angry and depressed, so I turned my focus to what does make me happy, and also I recognized that one of the things that gives me great happiness is teaching creative writing, and so I could write profiles of professional golfers or I could be a professor. Being a professor made me much happier. — Tod Goldberg

Young people today have lots of experience ... interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating [or] expressing themselves with new technologies. It's almost as if they can read but not write. — Mitchel Resnick

Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model. — George Henry Lewes

Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise. — Padgett Powell

Literary censorship should not be necessary within the parameters of the law because it's simply a reflection of prevailing social prejudices!

Writing should challenge and change prevailing ideas - churning the guts and ruffling feathers of friends, family and society. Antagonizing is a product of open writing. Expecting less is resignation and stagnation that slides the art into the status-quo.

Writing needs the wider view that shows the causality of our prevailing social prejudice - and shakes at its foundation.

Writers spare us no less and please leave your praise and oppugn to Christopher Hitchens. — Jack Tar

When I was younger I was much more polemical and didactic, much less trusting. Inherently my own vision of the world would weave its way through the characters. Also, my concerns are changing. What happens is you write a few plays and get boxed into some idea of what your concerns are and what you're supposed to be writing about. — Eve Ensler

Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write that day. — Rachel Aaron

Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you'll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you're able. — Philip Levine

I guess the approach to song writing for me so far has been to use more chords and less math. — Mick Barr

I always knew I'd keep at it with the plodding doggedness that I used to master lump-less gravy and wriggle out of fitness classes; I always knew I'd get a zillion rejection slips. I figured I'd write part time while working various full-time office jobs, and maybe, maybe in my 50s, I'd be able to quit and try writing full time. — MaryJanice Davidson

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur. — Julian Barnes

I usually base my characters on composites of people I know. One trumpet player in SIDE MAN is really a mix of four different guys I knew growing up. Patsy , the waitress, is a mix of about three different people. I like doing it that way. I start with the characters, as opposed to plot, location, or some visual element. I write more by ear than by eye. I always work on the different sound of each character, trying to make sure each has a specific voice and speech pattern, which some writers could care less about. — Warren Leight

I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster. — Nic Pizzolatto

We like to take credit when we get a new idea, as if we originated the idea in our brain, but what we actually did was no less extraordinary: we channeled the idea. — Chris Prentiss

There is a political process which we are trying to achieve through what is called the Vienna Group. That involves the establishment of a governing council, which is to take power away from Bashar Assad, to write a constitution and to open the way for elections. It is important that Bashar leaves in the beginning, not at the end of the process. This will make the transition happen with less death and destruction. — Adel Al-Jubeir

The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing. — John N. Gray

To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing. — William Gibson

I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living. — Nicole Krauss

Some of the subject matter is a little less weighty. When we were writing for Mr. Show, we were talking about how is this going to stand up to the test of time. Every little piece had to be this brilliant comedy jewel. — B. J. Porter

I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep. — Mike White

One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty") — John Crowley

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure
in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically. — Marge Piercy

Film makes me feel less alone in the world. — A.D. Posey

The point of the resurrection ... is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die ... What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it ... What you do in the present - by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself - will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it ... ). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom. — N. T. Wright

In the beginning, I want to say something about human greatness. Some time ago, I was reading texts of Kungtse. When I read these texts, I understood something about human greatness. What I understood from his writings was: What is greatest in human beings is what makes them equal to everybody else. Everything else that deviates higher or lower from what is common to all human beings makes us less. If we know this, we can develop a deep respect for every human being. — Bert Hellinger

The growing social consciousness of the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) can be found throughout the Austen Universe. While the Lady wrote about the gentry, she, none-the-less, was speaking to the human condition. Class is an imaginary distinction conferring no better manners on the "haves" and no lesser nobility on the "have-nots" and that the deepest human emotions are universal. — Don Jacobson

Prepare for every negotiation ... 1) Focus on Outcomes. What is it that you want to walk away with? Being as specific as possible also increases the likelihood of negotiation success. 2) Support your desired outcome with data that points to its reasonableness. 3) Writing down your key points in advance - and practicing them - enables you to stay focused on what's most important and avoid going off on tangents. 4) Err on the side of asking for more, rather than less [of what you really want]. 5) Be willing to walk away. — Lois P Frankel

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one. — Ludwig Feuerbach

Sometimes it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting groceries, or doing the laundry - banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis. We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up, — David Byrne

Step by step, you make your way forward. That's why practices such as daily writing exercises or keeping a daily blog can be so helpful. You see yourself do the work, which shows you that you can do the work. Progress is reassuring and inspiring; panic and then despair set in when you find yourself getting nothing done day after day. One of the painful ironies of work life is that the anxiety of procrastination often makes people even less likely to buckle down in the future. — Gretchen Rubin

Novel writing seems an altogether less intimidating occupation when one considers that one only need produce a small tale. — Charlie Lovett

Spend less time on social media and more time reading and writing. — James Gary Vineyard

When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax. — Natasha Trethewey

All writers read, Ms Rainn. With dwindling amounts of books circulating imagination, the less writers of all mediums will be able to exercise their own imaginations. — S.A. Tawks

Elmo found, as have many, that the death of the heart corrupted the pen into writing a farrago of horrors and insanities, not necessarily the less true for their seeming extravagance, but inaccessible for the most part to the prudent. — Robert Aickman

I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing. — Yann Tiersen

When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything. — Jonathan Meades

It is easy to criticize and find fault with the conduct of kings, and write furious articles against them in newspapers, or make violent speeches about them on platforms. Any fool can rip and rend a costly garment, but not every man can cut out and make one. To expect perfection in kings, prime ministers, or rulers of any king, is senseless and unreasonable. We would exhibit more wisdom if we prayed for them more, and criticized less. — J.C. Ryle

And the poet who fears to take the risk that what he writes may turn out not to be poetry at all, is a man who has surely failed, who ought to have adopted a less adventurous vocation — T. S. Eliot

Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides. — Walter Kirn

There is nothing more inimical to writing than the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism abhors the play of signs, the endlessness of writing. Fundamentalism means nothing more or less than going back to an origin and staying there. It stands for one founding book and, thereafter, no more books. — J.M. Coetzee

To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It doesn't make the landing at the end of that fall any less painful but, somehow, it helps them keep a little dignity their bone broken body. — Etgar Keret

Set fire to cities and nations, to hearts and minds, to the very core of every human spirit. Make sure your words seep into the skin of the reader, leaving trace minerals that sustain the ailing human shell. Make them pay attention. Set fire to the soul. Anything less is an abomination to creation. — Susan Marie

What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free. — Allison K. Williams

I'm disciplined about writing. I get up every day knowing I have to produce work. I'm less concerned about other aspects of the job, such as the prizes and promotions. Promoting my work can be awkward, unless I feel sociable enough. Prizes encourage me to work harder on my next project. — Sefi Atta

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too. — Sara Sheridan

I'm a lot less travelled as an adult than I was as a child, but I think living in far flung places gives you a perspective on the world and people that adds flavour to your writing. — Sarah Pinborough

I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him. — Neil Gaiman

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor. — Stephen King

I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose's guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting.
It wasn't thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn't know from the writing that he'd never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone's yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn't bad either: To Natalie, You're a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned. — Lee Goldberg

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know. — Marilynne Robinson

It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins. — Robertson Davies

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing. — Pico Iyer

I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook. — Vikram Seth

Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well ... Writing about why the positive events in your life happened may seem awkward at first, but please stick with it for one week. It will get easier. The odds are that you will be less depressed, happier, and addicted to this exercise six months from now. — Daniel Kahneman

I find writing the darker side, writing tragedy, a lot easier than writing happiness. Happiness is just less psychologically compelling, isn't it? — Paula Hawkins

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer's [review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the prehistoric origins of reviewing in Zoilism - a kind of pelting of pretentious literature with dung, lest the writers get above themselves; it is to the novelist what the gown of humiliation was to the Roman politician - a salutary ordeal. Less grandly, bad reviews are fun, so long as you are not the author. There is, it must be admitted, a kind of furtive blood sport pleasure in seeing a novelist suffer. You read on. Whereas most of us stop reading at the first use of the word 'splendid' or 'marvellous' in a review. — John Sutherland

Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink. — Guy Debord

I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb. — Julia Cameron

A piece of writing is never good," he told me. "There is simply a moment when it is less bad than before. — Joel Dicker

I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster. — Mohsin Hamid

Write a lot. And I mean a ridiculous amount. You have to write so much that you don't mind throwing away and changing things that you've written - which is the second thing you have to do. A lot of young writers are very precious about their words. Don't be - you've got to be ready to burn stuff. You're not as good as you think you are, at least not yet. The more you write, the faster you'll write, and the less you'll mind throwing stuff out. — Josh Lieb

As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self. Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert. — Gabriel Zaid

My impulse is always toward work, pushing, guilt, rushing. But what restores me, what allows me to interact well with my family, what allows me to get good writing done, is almost always the opposite. And I'm finding that when I practice things like rest, grace, peace, prayer, self-care and slowness, the work gets done just the same. Well, just the same except less crying and less apologizing to my family. I'll take it. — Shauna Niequist

Still, on 'Friends', we had some guest-stars who were less than spectacular, not the stunt-casting, but just regular guest-stars, and they weren't particularly great actors, but the material was so good that they scored. It's the writing. — Matt LeBlanc

It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous. — Lynda Barry

Brooding is more something I do when I'm working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We've worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos.
Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never though of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything better or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me.
Brand new.
News. — Jeanne Marie Laskas

Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing. — David Knopfler

Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish. — Kate Atkinson

I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now. — Jonathan Carroll

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up. — Chris Van Allsburg

I don't believe in writer's block. There are good days when you're writing and less good days. I've learned that if it's not happening to walk away and return later. I doodle a lot and often get my best ideas with a pencil in my hand while I'm doodling. The problem is, sometimes I lose my doodles and that's bad! — Judy Blume

We are so programmed to feel that our emotions are the most important thing in the Universe ... We write, produce and act in the story of me. And then we write reviews - and read them and get more depressed. All we can do is let go, and that comes from training. And then we spend less and less time in the darker spaces. — Krishna Das

One thing I like about writing is that it provides such a wonderful opportunity for confidential chats with readers. In the privacy of writing, and reading, we can discuss topics that are a little touchy, a bit embarrassing, and feel less alone in the process. Feeling consumed by memories from high school. Feeling wimpy. Feeling time-obsessed. Yearning for our fathers. Wishing we were taller, or shorter, or less average. To name just a few. — Ralph Keyes

As a German philosopher writing in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, Marcuse understood the sleep inducing force of indoctrination, its power to make people forget and forfeit their own real interests. "The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible," he wrote. "The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful." — Daniel Pinchbeck

Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the "grey sick faces of onanists," etc., etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The "democratic vistas" have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude - even "decadent," if that word means anything. — George Orwell

Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it. — Nick Antosca

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. — Geoff Dyer

I only believe in the easy things, like red lipstick
and coffee before noon and writing essays in pen.
I make my mind up about boys and then I unmake it,
compare us to continental drift, two ships passing.
I hit the snooze button too often. Write disposable
poems on napkins and old homework, try to discipline
myself when it comes to removing my makeup
before bed. I am trying to understand men better,
cut them some slack, write about them less. I dream
about oceans and mountains and wolves. I do not
always love myself. I do not always forgive myself.
I write apology letters and do not send them. Usually,
I do not mean it when I tell someone goodbye. — Kristina Haynes

I ended up at fifty, over-the-hill, thinking I had no future. Finally, I realized that I had allowed myself to write less than I could ... As writers true to ourselves, it will always be hard, and if we're good, we'll always be in trouble. Let's be sure we deserve it. — Waldo Salt

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment ... is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can't provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities. — C.S. Lewis

He was angry with himself for having kissed her and enjoyed it, only to be disappointed by her in the end.
He knew that love was never simple, but it was even less so for a vampire.
He shook his head in disbelief as he walked away. He had really thought that she was the one for him and had genuinely believed that he
was going to spend the rest of his life with her, but now, he knew better. — Elaine White

Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker. — Arthur M. Jolly

Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence. The advantage of this method is that you end up with something for which you will not be personally blamed. — Scott Adams

If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English and write their names and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars and pay taxes thereon, and would completely disarm the adversary. This you can do with perfect safety. And as a consequence, the radicals, who are wild upon negro franchise, will be completely foiled in their attempts to keep the Southern States from renewing their relations to the Union. — Andrew Johnson

An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment (which for the present consideration we do best to include as a part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it. (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again without troubling to put them back in their proper places.) — Erwin Schrodinger

When I was younger, I suppose I was interested in checking out as much about writing as I could: bad, weird, irritating, even things not-to-my-taste. Now I am less open. I will decide after a few pages if I want to stay in the world of the book, and if I don't, I put it down. I have less time left. — Susan Minot

I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults. — Lynne Reid Banks

Writing clean code is what you must do in order to call yourself a professional. There is no reasonable excuse for doing anything less than your best. — Robert C. Martin

I could always hold a melody, but I was never like, I'm going to be a singer. So I'm able to use that when I write. I'm actually playing the beat with my voice. Instead of thinking about coming up with melodies, it's like filling in the instruments. So sometimes it's better to have beats with less melodies in them, because then I can play more with my vocals. — Kid Ink