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Keep a strict eye on eulogistic and dyslogistic adjectives -- they should diagnose (not merely blame) and distinguish (not merely praise).
-- C. S. Lewis
Without self-approval, there is no self-confidence, without self-confidence one has no secure identity, and without a secure identity one has no style.
-- Kenneth Tynan
You know that place in your mind where a song can get caught and you can’t make it stop even though it’s driving you crazy? That’s the place writing is about: building bridges so that the 10,000 unthought things can cross over into surprised realization and stories that come to us whole. When people try to write stories they tend to drag the stories behind them. They think the story and question it and try to arrange it into something understandable, which is no fun at all! It makes a person feel exhausted and cranky. The best way to write is to let the image pull you. You should be water-skiing behind it, not dragging it like a barge. Writing should take you for a ride.
-- Lynda Barry
All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word. Why do you not save out of your speech or thinking only the vital things -- the spirited mot which amused or warmed you when you spoke it -- because of its luck & newsness. I have just been reading, in this careful book of a most intelligent & learned man, a number of flat conventional words & sentences. If a man would learn to read his own manuscript severely -- becoming really a third person, & search only for what interested him, he would blot to purpose & how every page would gain! Then all the words will be sprightly, & every sentence a surprise.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
He was interested in doing what was right—which sometimes entailed willfully offending those whose values he opposed—not merely being right in his taste and musical standards. He wanted to learn. What's appealing about him is the same thing that he valued in the music he wrote about: the life in it—engagement with and responsiveness to the world. To put a positive spin on the spew-and-rant factor, he didn’t care about beauty except as flow. He wanted everything included. He was confrontational but it came from goodwill, from his belief that feelings—sensitivity to what's going on—are what matter and that if you're going to really notice things, really perceive, there's going to be a lot of sadness and horror and filth as well, so to some extent they're a necessary part of beauty.
-- Richard Hell on Lester Bangs
It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind….It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas, half feelings, half thoughts, where we are little more than bundles of instinctive tendencies.
-- Helen Keller
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