Anita Loos and John Emerson, How to Write Photoplays (1920)

Above all things the scenario writer should keep alive. Just keep yourself with lively, laughing, thinking people, think about things yourself, and cultivate a respect for new ideas of any kind. Take care of these small ideas and the big plots will take care of themselves.

Derek Walcott, "Love After Love"

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was
your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Warren Buffet

It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Jeremiah Tower, on being in the spotlight

You got on the tiger. No complaining, no explaining . . . shut up and either get off the tiger or just make it better for you than worse.

Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Gregg Popovich, coach of the San Antonio Spurs

On why charitable contributions matter:

"Because we're rich as hell, and we don't need it all, and other people need it. And you're a jerk if you don't give it."

George Eliot

It's never too late to become what you might have been.

Semi Chellas

                                                                        

                                                                                    He called loudly for the stars to bend

                                                                                                                                    —  Yeats

 

October tastes like pennies on my skin,

    a taste of fingers counting change.  It's in

    these bitter autumn twilights I regret

    the cold too cold to let us out.  Within

    the circle of the lamplight I forget

    the dark outside, which, having lit the lamp,

    I cannot see.  The nights are getting damp,

    and longer, too, and it may snow.  I let

myself be kept inside, inside the circle of the lamp.

 

The window makes a sort of frame for night:

    it's how we know the night, as if we'd hung

    a picture on the farthest wall, of night.

    The stars are scattered as if they'd been flung

    in random patterns, throwing back their light

    into the room, where they are not as bright

    as lamplight is, nor are they bright as stars.          

    The taste of metal lingers on my tongue;

and this is how I know the bitter taste of stars.

 

It's how I lose the darkness, looking out

    from light, at darkness kept within its frame.

    And this is how we make the loss our game,

    it's how we count the stars on nights like these,

    it's how we count them all and leave some out:

    by counting as we count the leaves of trees,

    by counting as if they were all the same.

    The ones we know by name we count by name —

And then we count our fingers by such names as these.

 

And this is how my pen begins to sound

    on paper, just like books against their shelves —

    like ink on ink — like words against themselves —

    like stones in water — leaves upon the ground —

    It's how I see my hands, how they are wound

    about the pen, which, in my hand, grows warm.

    It's how I see the letters start to form: 

    they follow black behind the pen, around

its shadow, only slightly darker than themselves.

 

Flaubert, quoted by Shirley Hazard in Green on Capri

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Phillip Roth, in The New York Times, January 16, 2018

C.M. Looking back, how do you recall your 50-plus years as a writer?

P.R. Exhilaration and groaning. Frustration and freedom. Inspiration and uncertainty. Abundance and emptiness. Blazing forth and muddling through. The day-by-day repertoire of oscillating dualities that any talent withstands — and tremendous solitude, too. And the silence: 50 years in a room silent as the bottom of a pool, eking out, when all went well, my minimum daily allowance of usable prose.