Thomas Mailund > Thomas's Quotes

“Every long sentence can be broken up into shorter ones, and if you don’t know how—if you don’t see within your long sentences groupings of simple, clear ideas—it will show.”
― June Casagrande, It Was The Best Of Sentences, It Was The Worst Of Sentences: A Writer's Guide To Crafting Killer Sentences

“Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they’re writing fluently doesn’t mean they’re writing well.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“We have no king to establish the King’s English; we only have the President’s English, which we don’t want.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it’s fine.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“You would stay at home, the anxious hours ticking by, and you would wait for your Phone Man. It was as close as most people came to experiencing what heroin addicts go through, the difference being that heroin addicts have the option of going to another supplier. Phone customers didn’t. They feared the power of the Telephone Company.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

“I chose the members very carefully, based on their ability to correctly answer the following question: “Do you want to go to Orlando at your own expense and perform before Tupperware distributors?” (The correct answer was: “Yes.”)”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

“Been in a lot of time zones. Been on a lot of planes. Had a lot of complimentary honey-roasted peanuts whapped onto my tray table by hostile flight attendants. “Would you care for some peanuts, sir?” WHAP. Like that. The flight attendants hate us passengers, because we’re surly to them because our flight is delayed. Our flight is always delayed. The Russians will never be able to get their missiles through the dense protective layer of delayed flights circling over the United States in complex, puke-inducing holding patterns.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

“If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I’ve been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meal. Funny, isn’t it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner toll you could kill a musk ox with.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

“HAVE YOU EVER REALLY EMBARRASSED YOURSELF? Don’t answer that, stupid. It’s a rhetorical question. Of course you’ve embarrassed yourself. Everybody has. I bet the pope has. If you were to say to the pope: “Your Holy Worshipfulness, I bet you’ve pulled some blockheaded boners in your day, huh?” he’d smile that warm, knowing, fatherly smile he has, and then he’d wave. He can’t hear a word you’re saying, up on that balcony.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

“We review proposals because we owe it to the agencies that fund our work. We review proposals on airplanes when we would rather read a novel, watch a movie, or sleep. Patient? No. A proposal must convince reviewers that the topic identified in the opening is important and then compel them with the excitement of the questions posed in the challenge. If it fails to do this, it is dead.”
― Joshua Schimel, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded

“You are not just presenting your results, you are telling a story. You are, of course, free to write papers that simply present experiments and data; but journals are equally free to reject them.”
― Joshua Schimel, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded

“afraid that if they make strong statements, someone may challenge them or they may be wrong. If people feel challenged, you have engaged their interest, and that is good. Challenging proposals sometimes get funded; boring ones never do.”
― Joshua Schimel, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded

“Also remember, you are a scientist—it is not your job to be right. It is your job to be thoughtful, careful, and analytical; it is your job to challenge your ideas and to try to falsify your hypotheses; it is your job to be open and honest about the uncertainties in your data and conclusions. But if you are doing cutting-edge work, you are not always going to be right.”
― Joshua Schimel, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded

“You might not save the world with your writing, but you might fund your graduate students.”
― Joshua Schimel, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded

“First figure out what you don’t need to say; then, don’t say it.”
― Joshua Schimel, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded

“Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“This is the kind of thing that you wonder about when you make things up for a living. I remain unconvinced that it is the kind of activity that is a fit occupation for an adult, but it’s too late now: I seem to have a career that I enjoy which doesn’t involve getting up too early in the morning.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors

“Most of the stories in this volume have that much in common: The place they arrived at in the end was not the place I was expecting them to go when I set out. Sometimes the only way I would know that a story had finished was when there weren’t any more words to be written down.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors

“I saw her chewing gum, when I was thirteen, and I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

“The ear doctor smiled reassuringly and spoke the lie for which doctors should be immediately jailed (time of incarceration to be doubled when the lie is told to a child): “Relax, Stevie, this won’t hurt.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The adverb is not your friend.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“In too many cases the teachers and writers in residence are nodding, smiling, and looking solemnly thoughtful right along with them. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can’t describe, you might just be, I don’t know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“It’s been my experience (learned when I was just a wee lad with infected ears) that if a medical person tells you you’re going to feel a little pinch, they’re going to hurt you really bad.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“He didn’t worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don’t piss off people who work in airports. “Are you sure it’s not something like ‘The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment’?” said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story. “No, listen to me, I’m telling you, man,” said Johnnie Larch, “don’t piss off those bitches in airports.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods