#tin

The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking. ↗

— Allan Lokos

#peace #teaching #writing-craft #art

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#email #letter-writing #letters #writing #art

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#expectations #perseverance #writing #art

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#art

We never thought we were writing for posterity, because at the time everyone assumed that all the great standards had already been written by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein... The songs we were writing were supposed to be temporary things, of the period, like comic books. ↗

— Mike Stoller

#assumed #because #been #berlin #books

As to the war with Japan, the President had already received my memorandum in general as to the possibility of getting a substantial unconditional surrender from Japan which I had written before leaving Washington and which he had approved. ↗

— Henry L. Stimson

#approved #before #general #getting #had

For this will to deceive that is in all things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#men

What everyone agreed was not very nice, was the way Clémence had carried on. Obviously, she wasn't the kind of girl you'd ask again: she'd ended up showing off everything she'd got, and she'd puked all down one of the muslin curtains and completely ruined it. At least the men did go into the street to do it; Lorilleux and Poisson, when they felt queer, managed to dash as far as the pork-butcher's shop. Breeding always tells. ↗

— Émile Zola

#french-people #l-assommoir #puking #vomiting #men

The wounded were crying, and the rest were dying. Jack stood alone in a hallway of mangled men, who had been trained for this ↗

— Seth Tucker

#fighting #guns #monsters #werewolves #men

I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false ↗

— Gerhard Richter

#painting #art