Written Quotes
-
In teaching an honors writing class, I juxtaposed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, an electronic hypertext fiction written in proprietary Storyspace software. Since these were honors students, many of them had already read Frankenstein and were, moreover, practiced in close reading and literary analysis. When it came to digital reading, however, they were accustomed to the scanning and fast skimming typical of hyper reading; they therefore expected that it might take them, oh, half an hour to go through Jackson’s text. They were shocked when I told them a reasonable time to spend with Jackson’s text was about the time it would take them to read Frankenstein, say, ten hours or so. I divided them into teams and assigned a section of Jackson’s text to each team, telling them that I wanted them to discover all the lexias (i.e., blocks of digital text) in their section and warning them that the Storyspace software allows certain lexias to be hidden until others are read. Finally, I asked them to diagram interrelations between lexias, drawing on all three views that the Storyspace software enables. As a consequence, the students were not only required to read closely but also to analyze the narrative strategies Jackson uses to construct her text.
-
Most of the press is sent to my publicist so I do see most of what is written about me.
-
The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
-
I don't think it's necessary to put your feelings about photography in words. I've read things that photographers have written for exhibitions and so forth about their subjective feelings about photography and mostly I think it's disturbing. I think they're fooling themselves very often. They're just talking, they're not saying anything.
-
When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.
-
I was very much against the Vietnam War, and Max Askeli was visiting Lyndon Johnson in the White House cheering him on, writing editorials. And in The Voice one day I once referred to him as Commander Askeli. And I called in to The Reporter to go over the galleys of a music piece I had written, and the editor whispered to me, `It's not gonna run. You're not gonna run. Max Askeli has fired you because of what you said about him.'
-
I get so annoyed by famous people who have not actually written the books they slap their names on.
-
I have no courage to write much unless I am written to. I soon begin to think that there are plenty of other correspondents more interesting - so if you all want to hear from me you know the conditions.
-
Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 books I've written.
-
What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred or ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?
-
Amos built a wigwam in the clubhouse because he didn't want the reporters talking to him. He didn't like something that was written in the paper. I looked in there and saw an Indian blanket. He was sitting on it like a chief.
-
If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.
-
A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.
-
I don't have anything against this Jesus guy, but has he written, directed, and starred in his own movie?
-
There's a real fantasy quotient to my work. Any play that I've written for myself to perform in basically begins with the idea, "Wouldn't it be fun to be, say, Jean Harlow in a pre-code movie?"
-
Applause is interesting, but I'm a monster with or without it. Something is either well written or it isn't. 'White Rabbit' is not well written, and no amount of applause or royalties can convince me it is. I could have done a better job with those lyrics. They didn't say what I wanted.
-
Most of my recent plays were written in the railway train between Hatfield and Kings Cross. I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.
-
What did I know best that I had not written about and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?
-
The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in a letter or told to an acquaintance.
-
I had written a book called "Boston Boy" some years ago, and that took me from the time I could speak, I guess, in Boston through the time when I finally left to come to New York. That book had a number of sort of rites of passage for me.
-
Nature is written in mathematical language.
-
The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
-
That morning, she had found an envelope stuffed into her locker. It was from the Mercer Hotel, and held a plastic door key for their suite. "See you there tonight," Oliver had written. "Chomp! Chomp!
-
The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.
