Whit Burnett famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

  • If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.

  • This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.

  • The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.

  • I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

  • The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.

  • If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

  • David Alford technique that does NOT serve expression leads to exibitionism.

  • Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

  • The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.

  • Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.