It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit y...
Writing isn't about creating perfect characters. There's no such thing. It's about creating characters that are real; flawed-- yet beautiful, in that they know they need another person. Needing someone else doesn't make them weak; if they believed al...
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any mode...
So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles fo...
There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer -- in the 1860's he wanted ...
[last lines] Aibileen Clark: In just ten minutes, the only life I knew was done. Mae Mobley: [calling after her through the window] A-a-a-aibee! Aibileen Clark: God says we need to love our enemies. It hard to do. But it can start by telling the trut...
Alejandro 'Jano' Montes de Oca: I didn't know you want to be a writer. What are you going to write about, "fine boys"? Tenoch: No, about faggots like you. Alejandro 'Jano' Montes de Oca: Well, let me tell you that there is a big difference between wr...
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and w...
At the unconscious level, Americans believe that good people succeed, that success is bestowed upon you by God. Your success demonstrates that God loves you.
Clancy comments that the subtleties of national character can impact the world stage by making espionage more difficult. Americans were quirky by nature, making the sorts of eccentric moves that had to be followed up on as potential espionage cues. R...
There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages...so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unrea...
Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effect...
Spending $100 million on a fancy gym is completely unremarkable in contemporary American higher education. Yet $10 million for a really good online biology course that could serve millions of students is seen as an outlandish, unaffordable expense.
People must learn that the accumulation of wealth by the successful conduct of business is the corollary of the improvement of their own standard of living and vice versa. They must realize that bigness in business is not an evil, but both the cause ...
The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The “death play” of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels.
I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been ...
Start with the observation that American law is not designed to catch and punish every instance of illegal conduct. Nothing short of a totalitarian state could do that. It is designed to prosecute persons when there is a reasonable basis for believin...
Yet though Americans have been driving up to their houses for decades and entering through backdoors, side doors, kitchen doors, and especially doors through garages, architects keep designing houses with ceremonial front doors that are nowhere near ...
Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.
A brick could be used to help you become the next Great American Novelist. Hopefully after you use it to crack your own skull, and not too long after your death, the public will realize your genius and celebrate the greatness that was you.
And isn't that what we all are—a compilation of all of our life experiences, of little pieces of all the people who have shaped our days; all of us just fighting to make sure the best parts of us win out every day?
