Favorite Quotes

"To those who say every story has already been written, I'll bet the farm to a hole in a doughnut that there are about 7 billion people who haven't read the one you might rewrite." Luke Peters

Take care. Vern

This hasn't a lot to do with writing but it is good advice:

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Ernest Hemingway

That first quote made me laugh while I searched for this quote, which I think encapsulates everything you need to know about writing:

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
Ernest Hemingway

dags

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

Don't think fate or some other similar crap is causing your problems. You are, and you're the only one who can change what happens to you.

thats very validating!  thanks

You could take almost anything from this page.  A few that ring especially true:

◾“Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.” – Tremendous Trifles

◾“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.” – A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901

◾“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” – The Everlasting Man, 1925

◾“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” – ILN, 4/19/30

◾“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.” – Sidelights on New London and Newer New York

◾“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.” – Tremendous Trifles, 1909

◾“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.” – The Man Who was Thursday, 1908

◾“The simplification of anything is always sensational.” – Varied Types

◾“Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.” – ILN 1-11-08

◾“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.” – Introduction to The Defendant

◾“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” – A Short History of England, Ch.10

◾“All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.” – “On Gargoyles,” Alarms and Discursions

◾“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.” – ILN, 2-10-06

◾“When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven’t got any.” – ILN, 11-7-08

◾“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.” – Broadcast talk 6-11-35

◾“The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.” – ILN, 10-28-22

◾“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.” – Charles II, Twelve Types

◾“Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness – or so good as drink.” – Wine When it is Red, All Things Considered

◾“When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.” – Heretics, CW, I, p.143

◾“A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.” – Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox

◾“Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.” – The Common Man

◾“Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.” – ILN, 11/16/07

◾“The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.” – The New House, Alarms and Discursions

◾“To hurry through one’s leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.” – “A Somewhat Improbable Story.” Tremendous Trifles

◾“There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commericial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet.” – ILN, Dec 18, 1926

◾“Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.” – ILN, 9-11-09

◾“By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.” – ILN, 3/25/11

◾“Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.” – Chesterton on Dickens

◾“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.” – Manalive

◾“Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.” – ILN, 9/11/09

◾“I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.” – ILN 8/4/06

◾“To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.” – Heretics, CW I, p128

◾“Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.” – ILN, 9-30-33

◾“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.” – ILN, 1/9/09

◾“I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.” – The Victorian Age in Literature

◾“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” – ILN, 5/5/28

If you are getting the impression that GKC is the most quotable writer since or including Shakespeare, you're right.