John > John's Quotes

“A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
― George Orwell

“So how do you do it, with just words and just music, capture the feeling that my Earth is somebody's ceiling?”
― Sara Bareilles, The Blessed Unrest

“Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.”
― Stephen King

“Well, you know, I've been in so many writing workshops, writing classes, and to the right of me and to the left of me, there's always somebody much more talented than I am. And what I figured out is they're not willing to go through the rejection, which is enormous, and then the compromise that comes with, you know, editing your work. And so I decided a long time ago that I didn't have to be 'talented'; I just had to be persistent, and that that was something I could control. The persistence.”
― Kate DiCamillo

“You can decorate absence however you want- but your still gonna feel what’s missing.”
― Siobhan Vivian, Same Difference

“Sometimes, when you get something new, you trick yourself into believing it has the power to change absolutely everything about you.”
― Siobhan Vivian, The List