Quotes

Man is the animal that tells stories about himself to himself. — Salman Rushdie, Lecture at the University of Iowa (March 2004) It’s been years since I sat in that lecture hall, but Rushdie’s description of humans as storytelling creatures still gets me with it’s perfect simplicity.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. — Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will be clarified by distilling an idea through writing and editing, and your future self who will be able to look back on these words and be reminded of the context in which they were written.

Every night, homeless people construct their nightly shelters outside the Quaker meeting house. Quakers will not make you leave. And have a high level of empathy. A few weeks ago I was walking home and there was a woman, a homeless woman, setting up a space.

You are not a brand. You are a human being. Writing is your craft. Story is your art. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: who wants to read a story by a brand?

Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games?

If I’m anything at all, I’m not really a science-fiction writer — I’m a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology. — Ray Bradbury

If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship. — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The woman was simply leaving us alone with our future, the future she wouldn’t be a part of. She didn’t know how to do it or what it was, but she was trying to give it to us.

If you give half a damn about which multi-billion-dollar corporation “wins” a totally made-up contest, then you need to drop acid and spend some time in an ashram. — Andy Ihnatko, Pros and Cons, Why I Switched from iPhone to Android

I have sometimes thought that the reason the trees are so quiet in summer is that they are in a sort of ecstasy; it is in the winter, when the biologists tell us they sleep, that they are most awake, because the sun is gone and they are addicts without their drug, sleeping restlessly and often waking, walking the dark corridors of the forests searching for the sun.