Writers and Editors

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
~ Attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win."
~Jonathan Kozol

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.”
~ Winston Churchill

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
~ Oscar Wilde

"It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them."
~Truman Capote

“With the Internet, nothing is ever lost. That’s the good news, and that’s the bad news.”
~ Wendy Lesser, publisher of The Threepenny Review, quoted by David Streitfield in "Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It" (The New York Times)

"There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy."
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.”
~attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti

"An essayist is a lucky person who has found a way to discourse without being interrupted."
~ Charles Poore

"I see no reason why the word [literature] should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry while the rest of us are lumped together under that despicable term 'nonfiction' -- as if we were some sort of remainder. I do not feel like a Non-something; I feel quite specific. I wish I could think of a name in place of 'Nonfiction.' In the hope of finding an antonym I looked up 'Fiction' in Webster and found it defined as opposed to 'Fact, Truth and Reality.' I thought for a while of adopting FTR, standing for Fact, Truth, and Reality, as my new term, but it is awkward to use. 'Writers of Reality' is the nearest I can come to what I want, but I cannot very well call us 'Realtors' because that has been pre-empted -- although as a matter of fact I would like to. 'Real Estate,' when you come to think of it, is a very fine phrase and it is exactly the sphere that writers of nonfiction deal in: the real estate of man, of human conduct. I wish I could get it back from the dealers in land. Then the categories could be poets, novelists, and realtors."
~ Barbara Tuchman, as quoted in "Creating Nonfiction" by Rachel Toor, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (12/​3/​07)

"War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography." ~Ambrose Bierce

"First sentences are doors to worlds."
~ Ursula LeGuin