We Who Are Quotatious Are

Many Moons Ago Dictionaries Of Quotations May Have Been Less Needed Than They Are Today. In Those Good/bad Old Days, People Walked Around With Entire Poems And All The Shakespearean Soliloquies In Their Heads.

While Reading Writers Of Great Formulatory Power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I Find I Can Scarcely Get Through A Page Without Having To Stop To Record Some Lapidary Sentence. Reading Henry James, For Example, I Have Muttered To Myself, "c’mon, Henry, Turn Down The Brilliance A Notch, So I Can Get Some Reading Done." I May Be One Of A Very Small Number Of People Who Have Developed Writer’s Cramp While Reading.

What Distinguishes Us One From Another Is Our Dreams, And What We Do To Make Them Come About.

If Geniuses Can Sometimes Make Mistakes, Cannot The Rest Of Us On Occasion Be Geniuses?

I Was Recently Asked What It Takes To Become A Writer. Three Things, I Answered: First, One Must Cultivate Incompetence At Almost Every Other Form Of Profitable Work. This Must Be Accompanied, Second, By A Haughty Contempt For All The Forms Of Work That One Has Established One Cannot Do. To These Two Must Be Joined, Third, The Nuttiness To Believe That Other People Can Be Made To Care About Your Opinions And Views And Be Charmed By The Way You State Them. Incompetence, Contempt, Lunacy—once You Have These In Place, You Are Set To Go.