Raymond Chandler
“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”
Raymond Chandler
“Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The image is this feeling like one of those telephone poles you see on the street on which a lot of notices have been stapled and then torn away, and they leave little triangles of paper, held by staples. On those notices were things lost and things found and the photos of people missing, and now even the photos are missing as a metaphor for what happens in life. All this experience is tacked upon us and then torn away, and we become a residue of all this experience.”
Ted Kooser
“The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.”
James Fenton
“If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.”
Kingsley Amis
“One other thing — I am not writing a satisfying story. I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied.”
John Steinbeck – on writing his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath