“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman
How to write a novel
You never learn how to write a novel. You only learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.
― Gene Wolfe
The rider and the ridden
The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw
No more ridiculous than usual
Posted by me on Facebook:
Warning: there seems to be a fresh round of people making statements like they lost all their bras or they like mayo and peanut butter, and if you Like or reply, you are expected to post your own ridiculous statement.
I don’t do that, so feel free to like or respond to whatever outlandish posts you see here. Which is most of them, probably.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun – Wm. Shakespeare
I just heard a radio ad about home food preservation that compared it to capturing a little piece of the sun.
I hope that’s a metaphor, because capturing an actual little piece of the sun would be terribly dangerous and would incinerate the entire neighborhood.
Not to mention the unfortunate gravitational effects.
Plumbing vs. philosophy
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
~ John W. Gardner
The book you’re writing
Forget the books you want to write.
Think only of the book you are writing.
~ Henry Miller
How a sentence is made
I have been learning about sentences from Gertrude Stein, HOW TO WRITE:
“A sentence is made by coupling meanwhile ride around to be a couple there makes grateful dubeity named atlas coin in a loan.
This is what they all do.”
Safer. No more realistic, though
“People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.”
~ Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Trust a poet
“Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?”
~ Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book