Last spring, I shared my favorite writing quotes with an audience at the National Writers Workshop in Portland, Ore., sponsored by The (Portland) Oregonian and Poynter, and later in a column, entitled “And I Quote.”
Before my talk, I handed out index cards and asked the audience to give me their picks.
The approaching New Year seems an auspicious time to share their collection.
First, I owe you a couple of caveats about these entries.
Because they were jotted down from memory, some of them may be subject to questions of accuracy and attibution. More than one contributor pointed out that a quotation “may not be word-for-word” or that an author’s name had escaped his or her memory. Accordingly, I have left off quotation marks.
Some of these quotes also have entered the public domain, coming to us as words of wisdom proffered by editors, parents and friends, their roots buried in time, lost even to Google — believe me, I looked.
If you believe that an utterance or the identity of an alleged utterer needs correction, please let me know by posting a comment to this story or by emailing me at chipscan@poynter.org. The same goes for those of you who contributed and find your name is misspelled. Handwritten cards demonstrate just how thoroughly computers have eroded penmanship — especially my own.
For now, I’m happy to add these this list of maxims, proverbs and advice, pithy or prolix, dead-serious or laugh-out-loud funny, to my own collection, even if I have to preface them with “someone once said…” or “something to the effect of… .”
Some of these may seem obvious, or even trite, unless you’re in a bind. It’s then that a cliché can become a lifeline, helping you to take a risk, turn in a story or, in the words of an editor I’ve never been able to identify, “gulp and go.” The meaning these words carry has the power to inspire, comfort and school us in the lifelong journey of learning that our craft demands.
My thanks to those who contributed.
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
— Douglas Adams via Mary-Kate Marley
Buy the ticket. Take the ride.
— Hunter Thompson via Pat Muir
I actively try to suck.
— Chip Scanlan via Pat Muir
We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.
— Anaïs Nin via Adriana Janovich
The difference between a book that used to be 400 pages and is now 200 pages and a book that has always been 200 pages is that the other 200 pages are still there, only you can’t see them.
— Elie Weisel via Jeff Shaw
Go forth my book and help to destroy the world as it is.
— Russell Banks via Jeff Shaw
When life grants you the gift of a space where you can find your own temporal reality find it and mind it.
— Danna Webster
Sure, the pen is mightier than the sword, but only if you’re brave enough to use it.
— Tanya Huether
The greatest opponent of all is the one inside your head.
— Anon via Tracey Goldner
We read to know we are not alone.
— C.S. Lewis via Terrie K.
Normal is only a setting on a dryer.
— My dad via Glen Claassen, though I’m sure it’s not original with him.
I paper my wall with rejection letters. That way I know I’m doing something.
— Terrie K.
We all have ordinary lives and it is enough. It is enough.
— Garrison Keillor via Moriah Balingit
I have a lot of love for all people except for total assholes and idiots.
— Cameron Diaz via Curt Kipp
It’s not always the answer that’s important, sometimes it’s asking the question.
— Rabbi Gordon Freeman via Steven R. Neuman
Measure twice, cut once.
— Giuseppe Dal Monte, my Dad via Rich Dal Monte
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
— Isaiah 55:10-11 via Tim Bobosky
If you write, you are more a writer than a newspaper is a wad of paper with ink on it — you are a stortyeller. Never let the writing get in the way of your story.
— Finn John (“I made this one up based loosely on some advice I gave a reporter some time ago.”)
Nothing makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished or an old address book.
— Carson McCullers via Laura Oppenheimer
Success occurs in private, failure in full view.
and
A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are made for.
— “unknown authors off the top of my head” via Sarah Davis
Do your best with what you have.
— Anon via Ariel Hansen
Deliver your words not by number but by weight.
— H.G. Bohn via Tara M. Manthey
Type faster.
— Dick Clever via Jenny Carter
You must be the change you wish to see.
— Gandhi via Leslie Hawes
Writing is hard work. Anytime it comes easy, suspect it.
— Quote on a journalism classroom wall
You are creating reality. People will make decisions, change their lives, based on what you write. So get it right.
— “An Oregonian editor when I took a tour as a freshman in college in the early 1990s”
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
— Dorothy Parker via Kimberly Gadette
Don’t think about how you feel. Think about what you have to do.
— Advice from a high school teacher on test anxiety
Education is nine-tenths encouragement.
— Anatole France via Toby Manthey
Poor Faulkner. He thinks I don’t know the $10 words. Oh, I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones that I use.
— Ernest Hemingway via Jeff Shaw
Do you have a favorite quote that helps you write? Think it might do the same for another writer or editor in the year to come? If so, share it with us here.
