The Last Word

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.
—Homer

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
—John Steinbeck

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.
—Ludwig van Beethoven

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
—Edmond de Goncourt

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
—Ray Bradbury

If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.
—Annie Leibovitz

I write music with an exclamation point!
—Richard Wagner

I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.
—Woody Allen

It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.
—J. D. Salinger

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.
—Dan Rather

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
—Duke Ellington

Sometimes a great idea (or phrase, or metaphor) can pop out in the process like an unexpected twin during birth.
—The Washington Post

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.
—Terry Pratchett

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
—Charles de Montesquieu

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, and when you have it, you have it all over.
—Elvis Presley

Beware the man of one book.
—St. Thomas Aquinas

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
—T.S. Eliot

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.
—Harper Lee

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one’s nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
—Oscar Wilde

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
—Flannery O’Connor

The Last Word

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