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

There are so many kinds of awful men -
One can't avoid them all. She often said
She'd never make the same mistake again:
She always made a new mistake instead

He may have hairs upon his chest - but, sister, so has Lassie!
Cole Porter, I hate men

Every great man has a woman behind him... And every great woman has some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Love All

Bloody men are like bloody buses -
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear

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

Our worst fear is that the Common Fisheries policy, which is, warts and all, a very delicate flower, can easily be torpedoed.
Nigel Atkins, British Fisheries spokesman, The Listener, 13.12.1984

The badgers moved the goalposts
Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, BBC interview, 09.10.2013

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

A missionary canvasses the working classes for their souls in the same manner as a town councillor canvasses them for their votes.
Patrick MacGill, quotes in Terry Coleman, The Railway Navvies

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

English farmers' almanacs traditionally started with the first full moon after the winter solstice being "the moon after yule", followed by the wolf and lenten moons. The first full moon after the vernal equinox was the egg moon, followed by the milk and flower moons. After the summer solstice came the hay, grain and fruit moons, and after the autumnal equinox came the harvest and hunter's moons, the sequence ending with "the moon before yule". If a season had four full moons, the third was called a blue moon.

The American farmers' almanac named the full moon according to the month it fell in, regardless of equinox or solstice. Their list goes, from January: wolf, snow, storm, pink, flower, strawberry, buck, sturgeon, narvest, hunter's, beaver, and cold moon.

Other US almanacs used different terms, so January might be the old moon, February the hunger moon, March the sugar, sap, worm, crow or crust moon, April the grass, frog or planter's moon, May the milk moon, June the rose moon, July the blood or thunder moon, August the corn moon, November the frost moon and December the long night moon.
Stephen Bowden, of Cheltenham, Glos. 'Notes & Queries', The Guardian, 27.10.2010

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]

An emphatic moustache can redeem an intractable countenance.
Attributed to Sir Mortimer Wheeler by Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian 23.02.1999

My hen laid a haddock on top of a tree
Glad farts and centurions throw dogs in the sea
I could stew a hare here, and brandish Don's flan.
Don's ruddy bog's blocked up with sand.

Dad! Dad! Why don't you oil Aunty Glad?
When whores appear on beer bottle pies,
Oh butter the hens as they fly.

Nigel Jenkins, Some Words for English Viceroys, Rugby Players and Others, in Abuser-Friendly English, To Help Them Con Televiewers That They Can Sing the Welsh National Anthem, published in Ambush (Gomer Press)

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

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

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

At ego adulescens miser ualde, miser in exordio ipsius adulescentiae, etiam petieram a te castitatem et dixeram, 'Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.'
Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions VIII, 7

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've had a hatred of that letter ever since the night my mother became wedged in a porthole. We couldn't pull her in and so we had to push her out."
James Thurber, The Wonderful O

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)

Outrage, you see, is the caffeine of the 21st century, now powering huge swaths of the western world. Who needs a double espresso when instead one can just wake up, look at one's phone and search on the internet for something to feel outraged about?
Hadley Freeman, Guardian, 07.05.2014

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

She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.
Alan Garner, The Owl Service

Military intelligence is an expression which contains an interior fallacy.
Raymond Chandler, Playback

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf, to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. 'What! no soap?' So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
Samuel Foote (Wikisource)

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

I mentioned to a chap at El Vino's the other day that I didn't like Pinotage, the South African grape. I thought the wine tasted like dishwater.
"Yes," he said, "the correct term is 'muddy'. Some of our customers love it. They come in any ask, 'Haven't you got anything muddier?'"
Simon Hoggart, Simon Hoggart's Diary, Guardian, 6.03.1999

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

Roars of applause are nice too, but there is historical evidence for the belief that you get, in the end, better service out of a sound piece of denunciation and insult by some properly accredited reviler.
Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble

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

Crowley was currently doing a hundred and ten miles an hour somewhere east of Slough. Nothing about him looked particularly demonic, at least by classical standards. No horns, no wings. Admittedly he was listening to a 'Best of Queen' tape, but no conclusions should be drawn from this because all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into 'Best of Queen' albums.
Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

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)

The God of Quiz has eaten his own young, and we will now all scrabble in his droppings for formats. Praise be to the posed question, to which the answer may or may not be known, for by his grace may our endless evenings be marginally foreshortened.
Victoria Coren Mitchell, closing remarks, Only Connect special, first broadcast 25.12.2018

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

Railway Porter (to Old Lady travelling with a Menagerie of Pets).
"'STATION MASTER SAY, MUM, AS CATS IS 'DOGS,' AND RABBITS IS 'DOGS,' AND SO'S PARROTS; BUT THIS 'ERE 'TORTIS' IS A INSECT, SO THERE AIN'T NO CHARGE FOR IT!"
Charles Keene, cartoon, in Punch, 1869, Vol. 57, p. 96

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

What happened to me can be interpreted in any number of ways. To some, it's sure to read as just one more trip story with no relevance to the material world. Occultists of a certain persuasion will recognize the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel. My experience comfortably fit the profile for alien abduction reports, angelic contact, and temporal lobe epilepsy. None of these "explanations" for what I saw, coming as they did from a lower-resolution, flatter universe, could truly do my experience justice. Where higher dimensions are implicated, it's wise to remember the story of the blind men and the elephant and assume that all attempts to frame Kathmandu in 3-D terms are in some way absolutely true. But if it makes it easier to deal with, feel free to assume I hallucinated the whole thing and went completely, gloriously, and very lucratively mad.
Grant Morrison, Supergods, p.279

Optima ratio ulciscendi, non similem malis fieri.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI, 6

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

GAELIC SOCIETY OF INVERNESS
CONSTITUTION

*** 9. The Society shall elect a Bard, a Piper, and a Librarian.
Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, vol xviii, 1891-1892
With thanks to Gillian Spraggs

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.

[Its purpose is] to undermine and destroy the monarch, monogamy, faith in God and respectability, and the British Empire, all under the guise of a speculation about motor cars and electric heating.
H. G. Wells, letter to Elizabeth Healy about his Anticipations
Quoted in H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (2010) by Michael Sherborne.

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

There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsability for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed.
Cordelia Fine, A Mind of its Own

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)

The experience of the plays should detach us from ourselves in the same way as the encounter with fellow spectators. We have tried not to bring the plays closer to us, to assert their modernity or their relevance, to swamp them with the homogeneity that the modern world pushes for, but instead to celebrate their difference. I am fascinated by how the Greeks saw the world, and how they expressed it, by the different realities of Chekhov's world, and by the overwhelming particularity of Shakespeare's world. I don't want them to be brought to me, or made helpfully more familiar, to bolster a neurotically grasped assertion that the present world is the only one of import: I want to be taken to them, I want to discover difference.
Dominic Dromgoole, retiring as artistic director of the Globe, Guardian, 23.04.2016

There is something evocative about sherds - the detritus of the past. Crucial archaeological evidence, of course, and, if you are not an archaeologist, this vivid, tangible reminder of people who have been here before, making things and using them and discarding them. The past seems to echo with the sound of breaking crockery.
Penelope Lively, Ammonites and Leaping Fish

... many researchers are now arguing the thresholds commonly set for declaring that a difference is 'significant' just isn't high enough. To illustrate this point, some researchers recently scanned an Atlantic salmon while showing it emotionally charged photographs. The salmon - which, by the way, 'was not alive at the time of scanning' - was 'asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing. Using standard statistical procedures, they found significant brain activity in one small region of the dead fish's brain while it performed the empathising task, compared with brain activity during 'rest'.
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender

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

Sex is like Criccieth. You thought it would be
a tumble of houses into a pure sea
and so it must have been, in eighteen-ten.

His [Todd McFarlane's] writing strained like a team of rabid huskies against the leash of the English language.
Grant Morrison, Supergods, p.247

He is craggily good-looking... open-necked denim shirt... shining teeth hung from ear to ear like pillow slips on a washing line... all that.
Nancy Banks-Smith (describing Ricardo Belmont) in The Guardian 27.11.92

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

The sonnet, the little black dress of poetry...
Carol Ann Duffy, inter alia at the Durham Book Festival, 30.10.2009

Spraint is very important to otters - it's kind of like their FaceBook page, in many senses.
Brydon Thomason, Alison Steadman's Shetland.

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

"It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don't know" - looking quite serious - "how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I'm a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials."
Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

But I'm also interested in having a god who is demonstrably a ventriloquist's dummy. After all, isn't this the way that we use most of our deities? We can look through our various sacred books, and, by choosing one ambiguous passage or one interpretation over another, we can pretty much get our gods to justify our own current agendas. We can make them say what we want them to say. The big advantage of worshipping an actual glove puppet, of course, is that if things start to get unruly or out of hand you can always put them gack in the gox. And you know, it doesn't matter if they don't want to go gack in the gox, they have to go gack in the gox.
Alan Moore, alternative Thought for the Day, Today programme, 31.12.2011

À Alexandrie, un certain Thompson, de Sunderland, a sur la colonne de Pompée écrit son nom en lettres de six pieds de haut. Cela se lit à un quart de lieue de distance. Il n'y a pas moyen de voir la colonne sans voir le nom de Thompson, et par conséquent sans penser à Thompson. Ce crétin s'est incorporé au monument et se perpétue avec lui. Que dis-je ? Il l'écrase par la splendeur de ses lettres gigantesques. N'est-ce pas très fort de forcer les voyageurs futurs à penser à soi et à se souvenir de vous? Tous les imbéciles sont plus ou moins des Thompson de Sunderland. Combien, dans la vie, n'en rencontre-t-on pas à ses plus belles places et sur ses angles les plus purs?
Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 06.10.1850

[The Todal:] "It's an agent of the devil, sent to punish evil-doers for having done less evil than they should..."
James Thurber, The 13 Clocks

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

George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, 'You can't wear a bra under that dress.' So, I say, 'Okay, I'll bite. Why?' And he says, 'Because there's no underwear in space.' I promise you this is true, and he says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn't see any bras or panties or briefs anywhere. Now, George came to my show when it was in Berkeley. He came backstage and explained why you can't wear your brassiere in other galaxies, and I have a sense you will be going to outer space very soon, so here's why you cannot wear your brassiere, per George. So, what happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn't, so you get strangled by your own bra. Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit, so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.
Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

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

Souvenez-vous donc, ô de tous les animaux le plus superbe! qu'encore qu'un chou que vous coupez ne dise mot, il n'en pense pas moins.
Cyrano de Bergerac, Les Etats et Empires de la Lune

There is great pleasure to be had in lying down outside. On a sun-drenched beach or a cold Shetland hillside, wrapped up warm or in shorts and a T-shirt, a doze in the open air is rarely a bad idea. Wild sleeping is as rejuvenating an activity as wild swimming, and it has the major benefit of being a lot less wet.
Malachy Tallack, 60° North

American gastronomy is too young and U.S. wine consumption far too meagre for the country to have developed any classic regional food-and-wine pairings. Fancy New York chefs may tinker with merlot sauces or chardonnay vinaigrettes in an effort to sell more merlot or chardonnay. But there's no U.S. analogue to the grassroots European classics, like boeuf bourguignon with pinot noir or osso buco with Barolo - unless you count Oreos with milk, which is sublime but beside the point.
Beppi Crosariol, The Globe and Mail, 4.05.2002

Wine writing should be camped up. The writer should never like a wine; he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him; sulphuric acid should be discovered when there is the faintest hint of sharpness. Bizarre and improbable side tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies underwear.
Auberon Waugh, Perils of Being a Wine Writer

Winter puffins, dressed in grey, float in silence, picking at fish and plankton alone on the surface of the sea.
Adam Nicholson, The Seabird's Cry

One day, I asked my Finnish teacher if it was true that her language had 30 different words for snow. She fixed me with her big, blinky eyes.
"No, you poor deluded fool," she sighed. "We Finns only have one word for 'snow'. The trouble is, you English think that everything white that falls out of the sky is 'snow'."
Jonathan Clements, Schoolgirl Milky Crisis

Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them.
Lorrie Moore, How to Become A Writer

As for "write what you know," I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it's a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it's my duty to testify about them. I got my knowledge of them, as I got whatever knowledge I have of the hearts and minds of human beings, through imagination working on observation. Like any other novelist. All this rule needs is a good definition of "know."
Ursula LeGuin, When to bend, when to break, article in the Los Angeles Times 05.01.2003