Table Scraps: Primarily for Writers

If you're a writer you are probably like me. You enjoy reading what other writers say about writing. One of the writers in this list once wrote, or said, that he takes more pride in how many books he's read than how many he has written.

If you're not a writer, I'm certain that many of these table scraps will speak to you in some way or another anyway. Take your time. Relax. Chew slowly. Enjoy the flavor of the ideas as well as the words. 

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"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
--Elmore Leonard

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero. A bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
--G.K. Chesterton

"Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. "
--Walter Pater

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."
--Washington Irving

“Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.”
--Jorge Luis Borges

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."
--Italo Calvino

"More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."
--Kazuo Ishiguro

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
--E.L. Doctorow

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
--David Foster Wallace

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."
--Carlos Fuentes

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
--Carlos Fuentes

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me."
--Raymond Carver

"True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.
--John Gardner

And One Last Quote
"A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing."
--Don Roff

On Loneliness: 17 Quotes and an Anecdote

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

I was thinking about Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier this weekend, in particular his book Escape from Loneliness which I'd once owned several decades back. Psychologists sit in the privileged position of having people from all walks of life bare their souls to them, and after a long career they have ample fodder for anecdotal material in books and articles.

Thinking about that led to my Googling the word loneliness, followed by quotes on loneliness. This blog post assembles in one batch a few of the many that you'll find if you do the same. What struck me is how many different kinds of people from various walks of life have had something to say on this topic.

And what also hit me was the quote by Kurt Vonnegut that opens this passage today. I interviewed the author once, and to build a rapport I started by stating that in college I'd read all of his books and Herman Hesse's books. He replied, "You must have been lonely." When I asked why he'd make such a comment he said something like, "Anyone who is that into Hesse must be lonely. All of Hesse's characters were lonely."

When he said that my thoughts turned inward. I managed to keep the dialogue going with Mr. Vonnegut but inwardly I wrestled with questions like, "Was I really that lonely? Was I lonelier than I'd realized?"

What I see now is that Mr. Vonnegut himself was well acquainted with this "disease of loneliness" and had I been more astute I may have been able to take a couple minutes to digress on this. Who knows what may have been unearthed?

As for our theme here, there's a difference between loneliness and solitude. I'm guessing that most writers and artists relish their times of solitude. The quotes that follow clarify and amplify what loneliness is in its essence. You can sense a lot of pain in many of these observations.

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“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” ― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

“When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.” ― Audrey Hepburn

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke” ― Vincent van Gogh

“It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.” ― David Levithan, Every Day

“Nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it.” ― J

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed

“To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.” ― Joss Whedon

“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.” ― G.K. Chesterton

“Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

“In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.”
― Mary Balogh, No Man's Mistress

“I have been a stranger here in my own land: All my life” ― Sophocles, Antigone

Meantime, life goes on all around you.

Throwback Thursday: Quotes About Books

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. ~ Dawn Adams

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors. ~ Joseph Addison

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ~ Joseph Brodsky

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. ~ Katherine Mansfield

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. ~ Jessamyn West

Books had instant replay long before televised sports. ~ Bert Williams

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard

He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes. ~ Barrow

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. ~ Augustine Birrell

The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. ~ G.K. Chesterton

A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~ Marcus T. Cicero

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Do you have a favorite quote about books? I'd like to hear it.

Case of the Gilded Lily

Why are mysteries so fascinating?

One of the most popular shows on television today is CSI, a.k.a. Crime Scene Investigation. Essentially, it’s about the realities involved in solving murders. Though I’ve never seen the show, I know it must be popular because it’s on nearly every night of the week now.

CSI is, of course, only the latest in a long line of mystery, whodunit types of stories stretching back who knows how far. I remember conversations with my grandmother about the mysteries of the Great Pyramid and all the questions it raised. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it twenty-five hundred years ago and it is still unearthing unresolved questions to this day.

What is it about mysteries and puzzles that gets us so engaged? In the realm of literature Edgar Allen Poe made his mark with mysteries such as The Gold Bug and Murders in the Rue Morgue. Suddenly, a genre was born. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was all about solving imponderables with a searing brilliance. G.K.Chesterton’s Father Brown was a contemporary to Holmes with an equally rabid following. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot became a household name through the murder mystery genre as well.

When television culture emerged the short mystery tale became a staple in the nation’s diet for diversion. The Rockford Files, Columbo, Murder She Wrote… The shows made for good fun as audiences attempted to solve the crimes faster than their heroes.

With regard to solving murders the literary character, and television show, that most strikes a chord with me is the one and only Perry Mason, created by Erle Stanley Gardner and later played by Raymond Burr. Having just watched five episodes (on DVD) of Perry Mason Season 1, it’s easy to see why this was such compelling television back in its day.

There were probably two things that made Erle Stanley Gardner’s books so engaging. First was the air of authenticity in the manuscripts. Gardner himself had been a trial lawyer. He did not have to research courtroom proceedings as a journalist. He lived them. His pugnacious hero Perry Mason no doubt mirrored his own real and imagined courtroom achievements. Second, his terse contemporary writing style continuously moved his stories forward. He didn’t waste time on tedious backgrounds and family histories. The books strode through the story, both revealing and concealing, leaving the reader illuminated yet in the dark as Perry Mason persisted through to victory, and victory again.

The Mason team included his personal detective Drake, and the ever efficient Della Street who provided a perfect counterweight to the granite and steel Mason. Raymond Burr brought Perry Mason to life ever so perfectly, the tough yet considerate counsel, who never seems to lose his cool, or his client’s case.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s own story is especially inspiring for young writers because he purportedly never published his first novel till in his forties, yet completed 82 Perry Mason novels before passing on. Yes, he had been writing pulp fiction for years before “making it” so it is not like something magical happened overnight. As was recently pointed out somewhere else, the only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary. Gardner paid his dues before reaping his rewards.

Mysteries, puzzles, mind games, concealed identities, disguises, surveillance, cryptography, encryption and decryption, decoding secret messages… these diversions can become almost obsessive at times. But they sharpen our minds by teaching us how to observe better, how to gather information and “see” in new ways. Applied thinking and problem solving are valuable skill sets in the real world. Leaders need these skills, and strive to develop them in others. Whether in the workplace, the community or the home, we really don't want or need a nation of sheep.

But let’s save that discussion for another time and give our attention to… The Case of the Jaded Jogger. Was it suicide, or was it murder?