#thor

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#inspiration #writing-life #inspirational

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off. ↗

— Kellie Elmore

#books #life #on-writing #philosophy #poetry

The Palestinian Authority refuses on an ongoing basis to take the necessary steps to prevent terrorists from getting into Israel. ↗

— David Baker

#basis #getting #into #israel #necessary

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins. ↗

— Russell Baker

#assured #authorities #blues #days #good

Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven't seen it myself. I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority -because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#life

It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher). ↗

— James Shapiro

#collaboration #history-of-thought #shakespeare #teaching #life

To lead and live the life of your dream, you must arise and be in-charge of the authorship of your own destiny. ↗

— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

#authorship #destiny #life #dreams

If there is a void in your life then you will never fill it with cash! ↗

— Stephen Richards

#cash #law-of-attraction #material-goods #material-possessions #materialism

I cannot stand authority. ↗

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

#cannot #i #stand

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. ↗

— John Fowles

#writing #love