More negatives write than call. It's a cheap shot for me to go on the air with the critical letters or E-mail I get because the reaction of the listeners is always an instantaneous expression of sympathy for me and contempt for the poor critic.
I can take a lot of pats on the back. I love it when I get admiring letters from people. And, of course, I'd love it if the critics would notice me, too.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
I have asked myself once or twice lately what was my natural bent. I have no doubt at all: It is to look at each day for the evil of that day and have a go at it, and that is why I have never failed to have an acute interest in each morning's letters...
Micro: Letters create words. Words create language. Language, we are told, permits knowledge & expression. Language is what we are. Are we jailed?
The characters in the four-lettered word FACT consist of seventy-five percent ACT, so it is always sensible to see the character of a person solely by his ACT or deeds than his words.
To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years.
I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.
The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules.
E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.
If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.
Lots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was right. Of the letters she got about the problem, 92% said that she was wrong and lots of these were from mathematicians ...
And so I miss the fertilization that might come from a contact. And for me--yes, I think I might as well admit it--fertilization does come a great deal from contacts. Why then do I avoid them--in a sort of false pride--shyness--timorous modesty? I us...
I'm getting stale. I always do this time of year. I keep my nose to the grindestone and put in long hours and rustle up good meals and do all the chores and run errands and get along with people -- and have a fine time doing it and enjoy life. Then I...
Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you... I love when you say all that happens is good, it is good. I say all that happens is wonderful. For me it is al...
...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teut...
Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity—civilization’s backbone—that tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore...
Mika Kobayashi: What are you doing? Daigo Kobayashi: This one. Here. Mika Kobayashi: What? Daigo Kobayashi: A stone letter. Mika Kobayashi: Stone letter? Daigo Kobayashi: Long ago, before writing, you'd send someone a stone that suited the way you we...
Zero: [Reading a letter from M. Gustave] "My dear and trusted colleagues..." M. Gustave: I miss you deeply as I write from the confines of my regrettable and preposterous incarceration. Until I walk amongst you again as a free man, the Grand Budapest...
Major Forbes: [as Col. Shaw is writing, Maj. Forbes approaches him with a letter from President Lincoln] They've done it. Colonel Robert G. Shaw: [Shaw reads the letter] Assemble the men. [54th is in formation in the pouring rain in the Camp Readvill...
P.L. Travers: Why did you have to make him so cruel? He was not a monster! Don DaGradi: Who are we talking about? I'm confused. P.L. Travers: You all have children, yes? And do those children make letters for you? Do they write letters? Do they make ...
