Quotes

At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom.

George Carlin

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

W. Somerset Maugham

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy

The greatest gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you.

Kendall Hailey

He is short-sighted who looks only on the path he treads and the wall on which he leans.

Khalil Gibran

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.

Roberto Bolaño

Expectation is the mother of all frustration.

Antonio Banderas

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Erich Fromm

We live in a time of such rapid change and growth of knowledge that only he who is in a fundamental sense a scholar-that is, a person who continues to learn and inquire-can hope to keep pace, let alone play the role of guide.

Nathan M. Pusey

Why do you have to be the same as the others? …Most of them are stupid.

Ken Follett

I’ve always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art.

Gay Talese

It’s true what they say – all the good men are married. But it’s marriage that makes them good.

Gay Talese

With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living.

Gay Talese

Better that you should take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will come and you will find a place to put that.

Gay Talese

The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.

Gay Talese

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Winston Churchill

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along – and I must say I had a good time using them.

Tom Wolfe

If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.

Tom Wolfe

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Tom Wolfe

It’s fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed.

Tom Wolfe

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Ernest Hemingway

The English major is, first of all, a reader. She’s got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves—they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay—to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games?

Mark Edmundson

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

Raymond Chandler

She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.

Raymond Chandler

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun, you’d better take one along that worked.

Raymond Chandler

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

Raymond Chandler

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

Raymond Chandler

It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

Raymond Chandler

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

Raymond Chandler

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Raymond Chandler

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

Raymond Chandler

I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.

Raymond Chandler

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world

Raymond Chandler

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

Raymond Chandler

Yes, that bullet would have killed me if it weren’t for the eight pounds of ground beef that I keep in my breast pocket.

Raymond Chandler

I was wearing my powder-blue suit… I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Being a copper I like to see the law win. I’d like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. That’s what I’d like. You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don’t run our country that way.

Raymond Chandler

The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn’t move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to.

Raymond Chandler

You don’t know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favor.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.

Raymond Chandler

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Sara Sheridan

PG doesn’t think he has heretofore commented about a short quote he has posted.

However, he made an exception for this quote because 99%+ of every book/article/essay/etc. written by an academic he recalls reading was terribly written, in part because of the stultifying traditions of academic writers and publishers.

Having worked with advertising creatives/copywriters a long time ago, he will say they were some of the best writers he has known because they needed to provide seriously motivational text using very few words.

An advertiser was spending millions of dollars to broadly publish the words of a talented copywriter in print, on television, and, sometimes, radio because that copywriter knew how to create a message with words that would persuade millions of people to spend many more millions of dollars on the products the advertiser was selling.

For years I’d understood that publishing in paperback was the kiss of death.

Christina Baker Kline

This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.

Alfred Hitchcock

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

J. Paul Getty

I think there is a debate in the arts about, you know, whether we must strive for art for art’s sake, and you know, kind of try to keep political debate out of our work. And to that I say, I’d like you to show me an example of, you know, this so-called apolitical art. I don’t think there’s any such thing.

Sarah Jones

Good cover design is not only about beauty… it’s a visual sales pitch. It’s your first contact with a potential reader. Your cover only has around 3 seconds to catch a browsing reader’s attention. You want to stand out and make them pause and consider, and read the synopsis.

Eeva Lancaster

Welcome to the United States of sit down and shut up.

Walt Longmire

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

Elmore Leonard

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Here’s the quote in the paragraph where it lives:

But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

The business of business is relationships; the business of life is human connection.

Robin S. Sharma