Those whom the gods would destroy, they first send to the Treasury.
Barbara Castle, The Guardian, 30.7.1996

Magical realism: Term used by critics to describe sci-fi or fantasy when written by someone they know from Oxbridge.
Keith

Magical realism: Fantasy written in Spanish.
Attributed to Gene Wolfe

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
Attributed to Mark Twain

Pitet de lombart, labour de picart,
Humilitet de normant, pacienche d'alemant,
Larghese de franchois, loiauté d'enghelois,
Devocion de bourghon, sens de bierton,
Ches wit coses ne valent un bouthon.

It was the opinion of Christopher Marlowe:
     That all they that loved not Tobacco and Boies were fools.
Richard Baines

...the attack on marriage is an attack on property;
George Bernard Shaw, preface to Getting Married

The fact that alloxan, destined to embellish ladies' lips, would come from the excrement of chickens or pythons was a thought which didn't trouble me for a moment. The trade of a chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals to us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

If God wants to make my parents again the molecules will do just as well to start with, same as before. It is not a question of matter, which turns over completely every seven years anyway, but of form.
Margaret Atwood, Unearthing Suite

Harvey said that anyone who could deal with the dogshit problem would be elected mayor.
The Times of Harvey Milk, quoted in The New Statesman, 26.04.1985

the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

But sluts are good at using memory as a substitute for tidiness - though I absolutely deny that I ever said (as friends allege): "If you're looking for the tax forms, they're under your slippers in the salad-bowl."
Katharine Whitehorn, Sluts, Observer Magazine, 29.12.1963

The two best inaugurals of modern times were written by ghosts. Raymond Moley, a former professor of politics at Columbia, drafted Roosevelt's 1933 address, and its best-known phrase, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself", was slipped in at the last moment by another aide, Louis Howe. As for Kennedy's 1961 rhetorical triumph, his chief speechwriter, Ted Sorenson, was recently questioned by Deborah Solomon of the New York Times, who asked him point-blank if he was the true author of "Ask not what your country can do for you..." His succinct reply was "Ask not".
Jonathan Raban, The Guardian, 24.01.2009

They say here all roads lead to Mishnory. To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must kave another goal; then you walk a different road.
Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Either we yield to the Nazis or they subdue us. Or we stand up to them, come to resemble them in the process, are subdued to them that way.
E.M. Forster, letter to C. Day-Lewis, 1938

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if thou gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee.
Nietzsche

The problem about inversion as a strategy for change, about reversing negative definitions, about co-opting abuse, is that such methods still perpetuate the old distinctions, they still pivot on contrasts between open / closed, wet / dry, hard / soft, clean / dirty, culture / nature, rather than dissolving altogether such oppositions in sexual difference as it is perceived.
Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens

There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said 'Let us pray,' and we dutifully shut our eyes. When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible.
Desmond M. Tutu, Religious Human Rights and the Bible

Ben & Jerry's is an indulgent dessert that should be eaten in moderation. You should not be replacing more than one meal a day with ice-cream. We do not consider a pint or a tub of ice-cream to be a single serving.
Jerry Greenfield,The Guardian, 31.07.2008

Later in the evening Misabel went for a solitary stroll by the sea. She saw the moon rise and start his lonesome journey through the night.
"He's exactly like me," Misabel thought sadly. "So plump and lonely."
At this thought she felt so forsaken and mild that she had to cry a little.
"What are you crying for?" asked Whomper nearby.
"I don't know, but it feels nice," replied Misabel.
"But people cry because they feel sorry, don't they?" objected Whomper.
"Well, yes - the moon," Misabel replied vaguely and blew her nose. "The moon and the night and all the sadness there is..."
"Oh, yes," said Whomper.
Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness

there's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it again.
Quoted in Computer Guardian 02.07.1987
[Ad bene faciendum numquam, ad iterandum semper temporis satis]

I am part of the networks and the networks are part of me. I am visible to Google. I link, therefore I am.
William Mitchell, author of Me++, quoted in The Guardian 06.11.2003

News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.
Reuven Frank, former head of NBC news

If only the amateurs would get it into their heads that novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smouldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving, until one finds a few discarded valuables.
Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. It is not merely a matter of filling up a dustbin haphazard and emptying it out again in another place.
Evelyn Waugh, quoted in The Guardian 25.10.2003

I was in Mukden a week after the Japanese had seized Manchuria; and though afterwards one behaved as though one's memories of sandbags and impassive little sentries had given one an abnormal insight into the Far Easter crisis, one knew that in reality this was not so, and that one had been hardly any nearer coming at the truth behind the situation than if one had stayed at home and read The Times. Everything nowadays takes place at such long range that the man on the spot had often less chance of seeing both sides of the medal than the man at a distance; one can no longer get a just impression of Crécy from the nearest windmill. Though it is, of course, pleasant to pick up one's misapprehensions at first-hand, and to have them coloured by one's own, and not by other people's imaginations.
Peter Fleming, Brazilian Adventure

We can trace how the vegetable became animal, but nobody's yet discovered what impulse makes the mineral organic.
Clive Trent [Victor Rousseau Emanuel], Human Pyramid, (Spicy-Adventure Stories, April 1941, quoted by David Langford in Ansible 244)

Woman on n°73 bus:"Sponge?"
Woman with cake tin:"Yes, sponge."
First woman:"General de Gaulle liked sponge."
Overheard by Simon Fanshawe, repeated at the 2005 Durham Literature Festival

It occurred to me that photo albums are really just another kind of picture book that everybody makes and reads, a series of chronological images illustrating the story of someone's life. They work by inspiring memory and urging us to fill in the silent gaps, animating them with the addition of our own storyline.
Shaun Tan, on his web site

Let us start again, a lifetime after Housman, and have another look at what poetry might be because, if it is to be a matter of "powerful sentiments expressed in perfect form", we haven't got any. In this vale of tears perfection is not to be had. Humans do poetry. Poetry is all around us; to declare only a tiny proportion of it worth our attention is to take a tourist's eye view of highlights arbitrarily selected from a vast and complex world of human activity.

Poetry is closer to speech than prose. Prose is artificially connected linear utterance in which every sentence proceeds from the one before and connects with the one after. Only lecturers speak prose; otherwise prose is literary, a written form. We speak a kind of poetry. When you speak to another person, you are first of all adopting a role, the version of yourself that you use for that person, your mother, your boss, a man you're trying to pull, a bereaved friend, an interloper, whatever. The tone and pitch of your voice, the volume and pace of your utterance are all as important as the actual word you might utter. Speech involves strategies that are inappropriate to prose but are essential to poetry. Hesitations, repetitions, hints, refrains.

Living utterance is mediated by physical factors that have no action upon the ticker-tape progress of prose. These are breathing and heart-beat, which will change as the conditions of the communications change. Upsetness, fury, passion, disappointment, all change our speech patterns. Our speech halts, or tumbles or sags; we take rests, even crochet and minim rests, as we struggle for control, or clench our teeth, or simply lose hope. In poetry, bodily conditions are paralleled by the form: the meter of a poem is like its heart-beat, and may speed up or slow or trip or become a-rhythmic as part of what is happening in the poem; the line-length is the way the poem is breathed. In a poem that works, the voice, the beat, the rhymes, the line-endings all interact with the words and the tissue that connects them, which is their syntax and their semantic associations; what results is an action, a process, not an object. Poems may be mellifluous and the Housmans of the world may want to call them perfect, but they may be less interesting and valuable than the poem that enacts the see-saw of mental anguish, the desperate struggle to understand, because that is the poem that charges the poetic form up fully. Poetry is more like electronics than it is like sculpture.

Poems may call on sources of greater energy than are available to us in speech; the easiest of these to identify is rhyme, a device that can sneakily persuade us of the rightness of a conclusion, that can unbalance or ballast syntax, that can impose an accent on a speaker, that can load an utterance with mnemonic force. Internal rhymes can toll us through the troughs and peaks of meaning, till the conclusive rhyme arrives and shoots or dumps us on to the shore. The stanza form is like the trebuchet that launches the loaded rhyme. The formal patterning can be a source of great energy, if the meaning is rattling the bars, or, if the syntax is riding happily along its runners, it can persuade us of harmony and rightness, it can enact bliss.
Germaine Greer, The Name and Nature of Poetry, (Housman Society Lecture, 11.12.2002) reprinted in The Guardian 01.03.2003

Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
William Morris, 1880

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
Evelyn Waugh, Diaries)

If you were a reading child in the sixties or the seventies, you too probably remember how securely authoritative Puffins seemed, with the long, trustworthy descriptions of the story inside the front cover, always written by the same arbiter, the Puffin editor Kaye Webb, and their astonishingly precise recommendation to 'girls of eleven and above, and sensitive boys'. It was as if Puffin were part of the administration of the world. They were the department of the welfare state responsible for the distribution of narrative.
Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built

If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?
And if I am only for myself, then what am I?
And if not now, when?
Hillel, Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, in the Mishnah)

One might, of course, have tried experiments on a rabbit first, and some work had been done along those lines; but it is difficult to be sure how a rabbit feels at any time. Indeed, many rabbits make no serious attempt to co-operate with one. I except always a large buck called Boanerges (which is, being interpreted, the Son of Thunder). Boanerges had to breathe carbon monoxide every day. He sat on the table with his nose in a well-greased funnel. When he got bored he stamped. That was before the war, so no doubt the noise impressed me more than it would now, but I seem to remember that any glass one left on the table collapsed into rather fine dust. If one took no notice of his first stamp he proceeded to walk off. However, he was always willing to co-operate for such a period as he thought reasonable; but most rabbits get frightened, and to do the sort of things to a dog that one does to the average medical student requires a licence signed in triplicate by two archbishops, as far as I can remember.
A human colleague and I therefore began experiments on one another.
J.B.S. Haldane, On being one's own rabbit

Think about it. Just take the most famous novelistic characters: Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. Both of them misread to the border of insanity. Or Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Or Anna Karenina. It's sad, but it's obviously true: novelists seem to hate readers.
Adam Thirlwell, in The Guardian, 26.07.2008

I'll sing you one, O
Red fly the banners, O
What is your one, O?
One is workers' unity and evermore shall be so.

Two, two, a man's own hands,
Working for a living, O

Three, three the Rights of Man

Four for the four great teachers

Five for the years of the Five Year Plan,
And four for the four years taken.

Six for the days of the working week
Seven for the Tolpuddle martyrs
Eight for the hours of the working day
Nine for the days of the General Strike
Ten for the days that shook the world
Eleven for the eleven republics
Twelve for the works of Lenin.

Lady Astor: "Winston, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee."
Winston Churchill: "Nancy, if I were your husband I'd drink it."
Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan writes in The Glitter and the Gold that the exchange occurred at Blenheim when her son was host.

Lady Astor approached Churchill at a party and said "Winston, you're drunk!"
"Yes, I am", replied Churchill, "and you, madam, are ugly. But I'll be sober in the morning."
Unattributed

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.
Ed Zern, Field & Stream magazine, November 1959.
Reprinted in Best of Ed Zern: Fifty Years of Fishing and Hunting from One of America's Best-Loved Outdoor Humorists, (ISBN 1585743429)

Rhubarb is the celery of the gods.
Billy Bragg, The Guardian, 11.03.2008

Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.
Dorothy Parker

The thing is, however, that where the intellect is dominant it becomes the channel of all the other feelings. The "passionate intellect" is really passionate. It is the only point at which ecstasy can enter. I do not know whether I can be saved through the intellect, but I do know that I can be saved by nothing else.
Dorothy L. Sayers, letter to John Wren-Lewis, 15.4.1954

...Satan Strong, Scientist, Scourge of the Spaceways and Supporter of the Serialized Short Story. Satan was a bad egg whose criminality was surpassed only by his forte for Science on the Spot... ..."turning to the micro-ultra-philtmeter he rapidly tore out a dozen connections, spot-welded twenty-seven busbars, and converted the machine into an improvised von Krockmeier hyperspace lever, which bent space like the blade of a rapier and hurtled him in a flash from hilt to point"...
Theodore Sturgeon, Two Percent Inspiration

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.
George Bernard Shaw, letter to T. E. Lawrence, 07.10.1924

The book so written passed in 1921 into proof; where it was fortunate in the friends who criticized it. Particularly it owes its thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw for countless suggestions of great value and diversity: and for all the present semicolons.
T. E. Lawrence, Acknowledgements, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

And my pocket definition of science fiction has nothing to do with science, or technology. I define it as "the literature of testing to destruction." Which neatly includes sociological science fiction -testing societies to destruction - and "if this goes on" stories as well as stories of advanced technology.
Elizabeth Bear, LiveJournal comment, expanded in her own posting.

Even the crime in Edinburgh is different from what you see in Glasgow. Glasgow crime tends to be easily identified and solved. Maybe you're wearing the wrong football colors and you get stabbed to death - that's a typical Glasgow crime. But in Edinburgh, the typical crime is grave robbing. Things happen under cloak of darkness.
Ian Rankin, interviewed in January Magazine

Self-Respect - The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
H. L. Mencken, Sententiæ - The Mind of Man in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. And radio operates exactly the same way. The only difference is that there is no cat.
Albert Einstein

I go to the laundromat to do a wash. Included in the wash are 8 pairs of socks.
Out of the wash come 6 pairs of socks plus 1 grey sock and 1 blue sock.
A week later I go to the laundromat to do a wash. Included in the wash are 6 pairs of socks.
Out of the wash come 4 pairs of socks plus 1 black sock and 1 green sock.
A week later I go to the laundromat to do a wash. Included in the wash are 4 pairs of socks.
Out of the wash come 2 pairs of socks. The other socks never show up.
The next day I go to the laundromat. As an experiment I put in nothing but my last 2 pairs of socks.
Out of the wash comes a body stocking. In the body stocking I find a note.
The note says: "Quit trifling with the laws of nature and bring the machine more socks."
Jules Feiffer

First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
Martin Niemoeller

You're not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi.
Attributed to Humphrey Bogart by David Brown, in Star Billing (1985)

As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: you fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alleys of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bat and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.
Alan Moore, Writing for Comics: Part 2, originally published in Fantasy Advertiser #93, 1985; reissued by Avatar, 2003

Style, for example, is not - can never be - extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.'
Q (Arthur Quiller-Couch), The Art of Writing 1916

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish in the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other.
William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style

Style is what you get wrong, that makes what you do sound like you. Style is what you can't help doing. Style is what you're left with.
Neil Gaiman, Journal, 13.5.2008

And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses
Joni Michell, Chelsea Morning

And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
Leonard Cohen, Suzanne

Oh the sun shone down like marmalade and covered us like glue
The Wonder Stuff, Ruby Horse

I mean, if two women have an affair does it automatically follow that they're both lesbian? No, it just follows that they're doing something lesbian. Maybe this whole sex thing's a verb and not a noun, and that's why people get so confused.
Peter Milligan, Shade, the Changing Man #36

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
Raymond Chandler, letter to Atlantic Monthly editor Edward Weeks

You know, they claim what a great gift is talent, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure the biggest gift isn't that you care about these things so much that you're willing to devote the time it takes to learn to do it. And then you want to do it better.
Alan Bean, quoted in Moondust, by Andrew Smith

Good taste is really just a kind of aesthetic vegetarianism.
Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus

Ol' Man Willow

Hobbits all walk by the Baranduin;
Hobbits all walk while the Nazgul ride.
Hobbits get lost in the big dark forest.
Where to go next they can not decide

Old Man Willow,
That Old Man Willow;
Don't use his trunk as
A bed or pillow.
That Ole Man Willow
He just keeps yawnin' along.

Frodo B He does his worst,
Tummy a-rumblin' and
Parched with thirst;
Cross that bridge,
Bear right a bit;
He wanders from the path, and
He lands in shit.

Old Man Willow,
That Old Man Willow;
Can't say who's worse, him
Or Bombadil-o
Who just keeps prattlin'
Inanely prattlin'
Along.

Truth is a well-documented pathological liar, it invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.
Alan Moore, correspondence with Dave Sim, originally published in Cerebus the Aardvaark #219; reprinted in Alan Moore; Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, 2003

They were all creatures of that slight fantasy which is the most fantastic of all: the not quite right.
Margery Allingham, The Dog Day, first published in The Daily Mail 1939

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.
J.B.S. Haldane, Possible Worlds