This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When writing is good, everything is symbolic, but symbolic writing is seldom good.
E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born upright. The beauty of the American free press is that the slants and the twists and the distortions come from so many directions, and the special interests are so numerous, the reader must sift and sort and check and countercheck in order to find out what the score is.
Beauty | Free press | Man | Order | Wisdom | Writing | Beauty |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
At the time of writing I never think of what I have said before. My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me [at that] given moment. The result is that I have grown from truth to truth.
Assign someone to be your guardian angel. Give someone in your family, a member who’s smart and attentive, the assignment of writing down and recording everything that’s don’t to and for you… the largest number of adverse events, by far, is caused by medication errors.
Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.
Edward Albee, fully Edward Franklin Albee
The act of writing is an act of optimism; you would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.
David Hare, fully Sir David Hare
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
To see what students learn in school, look at how they leave school. If they leave thinking that reading and writing are difficult and pointless, that mathematics is confusing, that history is irrelevant, and that art is a bore, then that is what they have been taught. People learn what is demonstrated to them, and this reality will not change to suit the convenience of politicians and educations administrators.
Art | Change | History | Mathematics | People | Reading | Reality | Thinking | Will | Writing | Art | Learn |
Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington
No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.
Cunning | Little | Man | Memory | Need | Present | Reading | Wit | Writing |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
In the creative process, we are called to co-create with the thing that wants birthing. We must listen, open ourselves, summon courage, commit ourselves to the task, and begin. And this is the hardest part: in the face of nothing, we must begin. Not waiting for the sentence to be fully formed before writing the first word. Not waiting for the completed image to manifest in our minds before approaching the canvas.