G > G's Quotes

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called. 
”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.”
― John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

“demonym”
― John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

“Things, we are taught, are instances of ideas, concepts, and categories that are not themselves up for grabs. Blue is blue; boys are boys; big is big.”
― Daniel Coffeen, Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense

“All of which is to say, the way we make sense of things is rarely to engage the things. We don’t confront the things before us as something different; we confront them as something we already know, as if everything fits into pre-ordained buckets of knowledge, as if those buckets weren’t themselves created, as if buckets and categories themselves weren’t buckets or categories that might impede knowing.”
― Daniel Coffeen, Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense

“Every thing consumes the world in its own way and, in so doing, creates itself. This is what we call comportment, the way a thing hangs in the world, the way it carries itself in the world.”
― Daniel Coffeen, Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense

“I figured out something, Lorie,” he said. “I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match, as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Of course, Newt knew that Lorena was a whore. It was an awkward fact, but it didn’t lessen his feelings for her one whit. She had been abandoned in Lonesome Dove by a gambler who decided she was bad for his luck; she lived over the Dry Bean and was known to receive visitors of various descriptions, but Newt was not a young man to choke on such details. He was not absolutely sure what whores did, but he assumed that Lorena had come by her profession as accidentally as he had come by his. It was pure accident that he happened to be a horse wrangler for the Hat Creek outfit, and no doubt an equally pure one that had made Lorena a whore.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Uva uvam vivendo varia fit”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“It reminds me of stepping into a gay bar when you’re gay: Your cells seem to relax, because every neon-lit person knows you in a way straight people can’t, even if you’ve never met, even if you never will, even if you’re very different. And for once, you can fully let go of the fear of being the self that simmers beneath the calm banality you present to the rest of the world.”
― Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers

“There is a character in The Count of Monte Cristo who digs through solid rock for years and finally gets somewhere: he finds himself in another cell. It was that kind of moment.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“And conceivably there might be onions, as an antiscorbutic.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

“This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken. “Basically wishing long life and prosperity,” explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“Dismiss the thought,” protested Lindsay from a certain equine altitude, “for it would make us no better than common thieves.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream