Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial.
What makes a story a story is that something changes. Internal, external, small or large, trivial or of earth-shattering importance. Doesn't matter.
An ethical atheist is infinitely more valuable than an unethical pious! What matters is whether you are ethical or not; your beliefs are utterly trivial beside this matter!
Always write your ideas down however silly or trivial they might seem. Keep a notebook with you at all times.
Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.
Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.
I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.
When people have a hard task to do - one which stretches them - they become less concerned with trivial matters.
People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
The thought that we're in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial. We are one species, with a world to win.
A poor self-image is the magnifying glass that can transform a trivial mistake or an imperfection into an overwhelming symbol of personal defeat.
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
A television chat show is light entertainment, so it is trivial by its very nature. It is hardly the place to get people to reveal their innermost thoughts. Then it becomes sensationalism, and you lower yourself to the level of the popular newspapers...
While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.
The most insidous influence on the young is not violence, drugs, drink or sexual perversion, but our pursuit of the trivial and tolerance of the third rate.
To demonstrate this simultaneity is by no means trivial, because it may for example happen that the product nucleus always forms in an activated state at first.
No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.
The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation
