Rohi Shetty > Rohi's Quotes

“Ride close together. Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.”
― James Thurber, The 13 Clocks

“Don't get it right, get it written.”
― James Thurber

“I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.”
― James Thurber

“Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?”
― James Thurber, Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writers, Humor, and Himself

“The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.”
― James Thurber

“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness.”
― James Thurber

“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.”
― James Thurber

“Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?”
― James Thurber

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“You'll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things.”
― Ira Glass

“If you let yourself abandon the I-should-know-this-already attitude and simply accept your ignorance without giving yourself a hard time about it, then you can learn whatever it is you need to learn.”
― Barbara Baig, How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play

“Show your reader what you mean by those abstractions by giving specific examples, details, or statistics. Practice: Use Abstract Language Pick out an abstraction or two from the list you made earlier and write a sentence using it. Start with a short, simple sentence; then rewrite this sentence as many times as you need to, adding more sentences, if you like, and making clear to your readers how you want them to understand the abstraction in this particular situation. What did you notice in doing this? Here’s something else to try: Bring an abstraction to mind, then try to write some sentences that will convey that abstraction to the mind of your reader without including the abstraction itself in your sentences. To do these practices, you had to dig into your word hoard”
― Barbara Baig, Spellbinding Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Achieving Excellence and Captivating Readers

“Practice: Read for Specifics One of the best ways to get a feel for the power of specific language is to read the work of writers who use this language with skill. You can find such writers exercising their skill virtually any subject and in many genres. (You won’t find them—or only rarely—in academia or politics or government, where empty generalizations rule.) So take some time to read writers who can use language to show you something, and pay careful attention to the effect their words have upon you. If you like, mark passages you find especially effective, then go back later and see if you can discover which words or phrases created that effect. Write those words and phrases in your notebook, look up the meanings of any words you don’t know, and practice using them.”
― Barbara Baig, Spellbinding Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Achieving Excellence and Captivating Readers

“Nike’s snappy logo “Just do it” reminds us that it’s unnecessary to be motivated, get ourselves together, or even feel like doing it. The key is to get up and go.”
― Patricia Ryan Madson, Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up

“Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of
undeserving people.”
― Charles T. Munger

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets