This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.
Confidence | Means | Writing | Think |
Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
You say you are not happy in the Mission. That, in itself, is not a sign that God does not want you there. Perfect contentment is never to be found, in whatever place and condition one may be. This life is full of annoyances and troubles both of mind and of body; it is a state of continual agitation, which snatches peace of mind from those who think they possess it and eludes those who seek it. Did Our Lord lead an easy life?
Books | Custom | Reason | Writing | Understand |
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith.... Afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down.... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
Writing |
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
I haven't seen the book, I have seen the passages that were compared between the two books, I must say I don't accept the idea that this could have been accidentally or innocently done. The passages are too many and the similarities are too extensive.
Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
Writing |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelligence must direct the man of labor.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
Sinéad O’Connor, fully Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor
When you live with the Devil you learn there's a God very quickly.
Stanley Kunitz, fully Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow when a new life begins for me, as it does each day, as it does each way.
Writing |
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.
Assertion | Bible | Body | Credit | Custom | Danger | Desire | Dogma | Faith | Giving | Humanity | Impossibility | Innovation | Invention | Life | Life | Lord | Man | Means | Men | Present | Regard | Right | Sin | Teach | Unity | Will | Writing | Danger | Bible | Learn | Old |
Scientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits… Culture can potentiate as well as constrain—as Darwin's translation of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection. In any case, objective minds do not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable embedding.
Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments. No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined). Local adaptation may as well lead to anatomical simplification as to greater complexity. As an adult, the famous parasite Sacculina, a barnacle by ancestry, looks like a formless bag of reproductive tissue attached to the underbelly of its crab host (with ‘roots’ of equally formless tissue anchored within the body of the crab itself)—a devilish device to be sure (at least by our aesthetic standards), but surely less anatomically complex than a barnacle on the bottom of your boat, waving its legs through the water in search of food.
History | Question | Search | Style | Will | Writing | Victim |
The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier'sancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.
I regard [the many worlds interpretation] as self-evidently correct. [T.F.: Yet some don't find it evident to themselves.] Yeah, well, there are some people who spend an awful lot of time talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. My attitude — I would paraphrase Gœring—is that when I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun.
Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false.
Error | Insight | Literature | Promise | Writing | Loss | Instruction |
Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim
I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.
Writing |
Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim
Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.
Writing |