Famous Writers Quotes
Writing and medicine
“Disease, as it stalks the land, cannot keep pace with the incurable vice of scribbling about it.”
–John Maynow, 1668
“The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”
–Voltaire
“It requires a great deal of faith for a man to be cured by his own placebos.”
–John L. McClenahan
“A medical paper should be like a lady’s dress–short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the subject.”
–Anonymous, 1954
“The pencil is greater than the stethoscope.”
–Earle P. Scarlett
“Many medical writers appear seriously addicted to “significant” in its nonstatistical sense. The word is convenient, for it implies so much and means so little. One may even find five wearisome “significants” on one typed double-spaced page!”
–Franz J. Ingelfinger, 1976
“Medicine and writing go well together, they shed light on each other and both do better by going hand in hand. A doctor possessed of the writer’s art will be the better consoler to anyone rolling in agony; conversely, a writer who understands the life of the body, its powers and its pains, its fluids and functions, its blessings and banes, has a great advantage over him who knows nothing of such things.”
–Thomas Mann
Living and dying in good health
“They had me on the operating table all day. They looked into my stomach, my gall bladder, they examined everything inside of me. Know what they decided? I need glasses.”
–Joe E. Lewis
“Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.”
–Erma Bombeck
“Be careful while reading health books, you might die of a misprint.”
–Mark Twain
“For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.”
–Johnny Carson
“The secret to health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
–Buddha
“Quit worrying about your health. It’ll go away.”
–Robert Orben
The curse of the cure
“Expensive medicines are always good: if not for the patient, at least for the druggist.”
–Russian Proverb
“One should treat as many patients as possible with a new drug while it still has the power to heal.”
–William Osler
“If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.”
–Henry David Thoreau
“The arrival in town of a good clown is of more benefit to the people than the arrival of 20 asses laden with medicine.”
–Thomas Sydenham
What you read in the papers
“The journalist’s first allegiance is to those who receive the work. Although there is no doubt that many owners and business managers of news organizations also have a deep allegiance to the public, that allegiance is necessarily alloyed with their concern for their own point of view or for the bottom line.”
–Bill Kovach, curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, formerly editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and a New York Times editor.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge isn’t the ignorance of knowledge but the illusion of it.”
–Stephen Hawking
“Until the lions have their historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.”
–African Proverb
A writer’s opinions
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most men’s conscience, habits and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”
–George Santayana
“Every man…should periodically be compelled to listen to opinions which are infuriating to him. To hear nothing but what is pleasing to one is to make a pillow of the mind.”
–St. John Ervine
“Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
–Mark Twain
“True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long. They run away from a man’s mind, so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason. Once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable.”
–Plato
“As soon as anybody belongs to a certain narrow creed in science, every unprejudiced and true perception is gone.”
–Goethe
Getting it right
“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
–Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
–Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
“Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think there are no little things.”
–Bruce Barton
“No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at the right place.”
–Isaac Babel
“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.”
–Robert Cormier
“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”
–Linus Pauling
Science and skydiving
“If at first you don’t succeed, well, so much for skydiving.”
–Victor O’Reilly, Games of the Hangman
“All we know so far is what doesn’t work.”
–Richard Feynman
“A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”
–Frank Lloyd Wright
“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”
–Goethe
“My only hope is that at least it may stagger you in your certainties.”
–Charles Darwin, to people he knew he wasn’t going to convince
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
–Yogi Berra
Revision derision
“I’ve done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.”
–Raymond Carver
“When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I’m on the right track.”
–Peter DeVries
“The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over … I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.”
–Toni Morrison
“Unfortunately, most news writing is the product of a first draft culture.”
–Michael Gartner
“The biggest problem with revising is not the words, it’s the attitude.”
–Chip Scanlan
“I love the flowers of afterthought.”
–Bernard Malamud
Liberty and the liberal arts
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”
–Benjamin Franklin
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
–Mark Twain
“They would be subject to no one, neither to lawful ruler nor to the reign of law, but would be altogether and absolutely free. That is the way they got their tyrants, for either servitude or freedom, when it goes to extremes, is an utter bane, while either in due measure is altogether a boon.”
–Plato, Eighth Letter
“Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.”
–Michel de Montaigne
The reader over your shoulder
“What I have dreamed in one hour is worth more than what you have done in four.”
–Lorenzo de’ Medici, to a friend who scolded him for sleeping late. (Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier)
“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”
–Barbara Kingsolver
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
–Muriel Rukeyser
The work of art
“Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.”
–Winston Churchill
“I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.”
–Duke Ellington
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
–Oscar Wilde
“I shut my eyes in order to see.”
–Paul Gauguin
“Everybody lives by selling something.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.”
–Fyodor Dostoyevski
“What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”
–Eugene Delacroix
“The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.”
–Hazrat Inayat Khan
The art of work
“First study the science. Then practice the art which is born of that science.”
–DaVinci, Leonardo
“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark.You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
–Steuart Henderson Britt
“The truth must dazzle gradually…”
Emily Dickinson
“A man, in order to establish himself in the world, does everything he can to appear established there.”
–La Rochefoucauld
“It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.”
–Frank O’Hara
“As soon as you move one step from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the written or spoken word.”
–Peter Drucker
“Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utterly ignoring all that you reject.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I quote others only the better to express myself.”
–Michel de Montaigne
Real things
“We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial
flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.”
–Alfred E. Newman
“The way to get people to build a ship is not to teach them carpentry, assign them tasks, and give them schedules to meet; but to inspire them to long for the infinite immensity of the sea.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
–Robert Frost
“Without a plan, it doesn’t matter which way you’re going.”
–Lewis Carroll
“The honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.”
–Aristotle
Science and child’s play
“I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.”
–Charles Darwin 1809-1882
“Whoever wins to a great scientific truth will find a poet before him in the quest.”
–Frederic Wood-Jones 1879-1954
“The understanding of atomic physics is child’s play, compared with the understanding of child’s play.”
–David Kresh
Freedom of speech
“Ted Sorrenson, JFK’s presidential speech writer, when asked how it came about that he wrote the “ask not what you can do…” speech, he would answer ‘ask not.’”
–Peggy Noonan (Nixon’s speechwriter)
“People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought, which they avoid.”
–Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Living and learning
“If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.”
–Van Gogh
“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.”
–Arnold Edinborough
“It is said that for money you can have everything, but you cannot. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; knowledge but not wisdom; glitter, but not beauty; fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; leisure, but not peace. You can have the husk of everything for money, but not the kernel.”
–Arne Garborg
“I was under medication when I made the decision not to burn the tapes.”
–Richard M. Nixon
Word wizardry
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
–Tom Clancy
“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.”
- Wernher Von Braun
“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Never mistake motion for action.”
–Ernest Hemingway
“The truth is more important than the facts.”
–Frank Lloyd Wright
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
–Albert Einstein
Self-development
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
–e. e. cummings
“Appreciation is the strongest emotion we have for attracting what we want.”
–Abraham
“The world changes too fast, making detailed plans obsolete before you can implement them. Far better than a precise plan is a clear sense of direction and compelling beliefs. And that lies within you. The question is, how do you evoke it?”
–Dee Hock
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”
–Rumi
For What it’s worth
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”
–Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
–Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
–A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)
“The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt.”
–Wendy Kaminer
“For every problem there is a solution that is neat and simple–and wrong.”
–H.L. Mencken
For laughs
“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”
–Peter Devries
“I tried Flintstones vitamins. I didn’t feel any better, but I could stop the car with my feet.”
–Joan St. Onge
“Fact: 50 percent of the doctors practicing in this country today graduated in the lower half of their classes.”
–Ron Dentinger
“Specialist: A doctor who has a smaller practice, but a larger house.” –Ron Dentinger
“Bacteria: The only culture some people have.”
–Hesiod
“All them surgeons-they’re highway robbers. Why do you think they wear masks when they work on you?”
–Archie Bunker
“I was going to have plastic surgery until I noticed that the doctors office was full of portraits by Picasso.”
–Rita Rudner
“I saw a commercial on TV the other day for Preparation H that said, ‘Kiss your hemorrhoids good-bye.’ Not even if I could.”
–John Mendoza
“What’s great about aspirin is that no matter how long you suck on it, it never loses its flavor.”
–Gregg Rogell
“Bad spellers of the world, untie!”
–Graffito
“My friend thought he was not gonna make it. Then he started thinking positive. Now he’s positive he’s not gonna make it.”
–Sammy Shore
“Epitaph for a hypochondriac: I told you so! ”
–Anonymous