O. Henry Quotes
I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.
Quotes to Explore
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Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.
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All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it's a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.
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I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.
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Many past products advertised in old publications can be profitably promoted all over again. Sometimes, just by giving them a new twist or modern application, you'll hit a real winner.
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I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style.
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Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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After a decade in public life working to stop Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons, I cannot support a deal giving Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief - in return for letting it maintain an advanced nuclear program and the infrastructure of a threshold nuclear state.
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I don't like giving up hits and stuff, but I try not to show it. I don't want the hitter to see that something bothers me.
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I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
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I wish the press were paying more attention to the erosion of the Constitution and the slippery slope that we're getting into, by giving up the right of the Congress to talk about when and how and where we go to war.
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When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best.
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If I weren't a performer, I would be still be writing and songwriting. Plus, I also really want to get into producing.
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Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.
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You owe it to yourself to be the best person possible. Because if you are, others will want to be with you, want to provide you with the things you want in exchange for what you're giving to them.
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One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.
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But what I realized when I was looking back at them was that no matter how different they are, they're still coming from me, and they're still coming from my brain and my set of obsessions. I think that no matter how different I tried to make them, there were just these certain questions that I just kept circling back to as I was writing. I think they were the ones I was really swept up in in that decade.
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Everybody thinks I'm so nice because they hear me so nice at night. And I'm like, 'No, I'm just tired. I'm exhausted, OK?'
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But anyone who knows anything about the music industry knows it's not only about the music.
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I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.
