#instruction

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.) ↗

— John Gardner

#books #craft #craftsmanship #fiction #genre-fiction

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#instruction #painted #photograph #picture #sun

Therefore, a person should first be changed by a teacher's instructions, and guided by principles of ritual. Only then can he observe the rules of courtesy and humility, obey the conventions and rules of society, and achieve order. ↗

— Xun Zi

#changed #conventions #courtesy #first #guided

It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used. ↗

— Sun Tzu

#agents #bribe #care #come #conduct

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle - or instruction. ↗

— Harold Brodkey

#defined #disease #event #god #immensity

What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or decides, for some reason, that he wants to override his instruction sheet some afternoon? ↗

— David R. Brower

#bed #decides #gets #guy #happens

By the age of eleven it was . . . too late for the piano and the violin. ↗

— Jasper Rees

#age

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it. ↗

— Raoul Vaneigem

#each #instructions #key #us #within

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. ↗

— Voltaire

#books #communicate #fetch #find #fire

For me, this is a familiar image - people in the organization ready and willing to do good work, wanting to contribute their ideas, ready to take responsibility, and leaders holding them back, insisting that they wait for decisions or instructions. ↗

— Margaret J. Wheatley

#contribute #decisions #familiar #good #good work