On Writing: A Collection of quotes and commentary

  “I like a newspaper so I can underline & clip articles.” – Norma Blanton, columnist for THE (Amity, AR) SOUTHERN STANDARD, May 31, 2012

* “My writing started with a prayer back when I was 32, and a single mom with two small children” – Judy Linze, Illinois, a member of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum Educational Center’s writers’ retreat, June 4-8, 2012. HPMEC is located in Piggott, AR.

* “… drifted into journalism and never figured out how to drift back out of it.” – Seamus McGraw (January 15, 2012)

* Epigraph? “Time has passed, and that makes all the difference.” – P. Greenberg, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, February 12, 2012

* “I think it takes obsession, searching for the details for any artist to be good.” ––Barbra Streisand

* “A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.” ––James Dickey

*When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.” – Enrique Jardiel Poncela

* “Be brave enough to live life creatively, the creative place where no one else has been.” – Alan Alda

* Books can be harder to kick out than termites. – Laura Jofre, AP

* Two similes found in one day’s newspaper, September 23, 2009:1. “... like grasping open air.” (Editorial, AD-G); 2. “... like hauling smoke in a wheelbarrow.” (Letter-to-the-editor)

* “You want to be a writer, don’t know how or when? / Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.” – Paul Simon (AD-G cryptoquote)

* Paul Greenberg (AD-G) quotes satirist H. L. Mencken’s opinion of Warren G. Harding’s rhetorical style:
“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” -December 15, 2010

* “When I read the latest Arkansas Times poll and saw that John Grisham and not Don Harington or Paul Lake was the best Arkansas writer, I realized there was no point in a duffer like me even trying. So, I’m giving up the writing game, getting into the painting game.” ––Jack Butler, Arkansas Times, August 9, 1996

* A character in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet says, “Knowing the names of things braces people up.” This must be why I jot down all the words I don’t know—to ‘brace up,’ to feel intellectual, to feel knowledgeable, to feel, well, like a Mensan?

Then how to feel when a fellow writer chides me for “sending her to the dictionary” when I used “inordinate” instead of “excessive” in an email?

       

    

 c 2018, PL d/b/a lovepat press, Benton AR USA