This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In writing one should hear all the whisperings, all the shouting, all the crying, all the loving and all the hating of the many voices in the past, and those voices will never speak to a writer in a foreign language.
Those who knew that the judgements of many centuries had reinforced the opinion that the Earth is placed motionless in the middle of heaven, as though at its centre, if I on the contrary asserted that the Earth moves, I hesitated for a long time whether to bring my treatise, written to demonstrate its motion, into the light of day, or whether it would not be better to follow the example of the Pythagoreans and certain others, who used to pass on the mysteries of their philosophy merely to their relatives and friends, not in writing but by personal contact, as the letter of Lysis to Hipparchus bears witness. And indeed they seem to me to have done so, not as some think from a certain jealousy of communicating their doctrines, but so that their greatest splendours, discovered by the devoted research of great men, should not be exposed to the contempt of those who either find it irksome to waste effort on anything learned, unless it is profitable, or if they are stirred by the exhortations and examples of others to a high-minded enthusiasm for philosophy, are nevertheless so dull-witted that among philosophers they are like drones among bees.
Better | Contempt | Earth | Effort | Enthusiasm | Example | Jealousy | Light | Opinion | Philosophy | Research | Time | Waste | Writing | Think |
Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
Anecdotally, when Oppenheimer was working at Göttingen, Dirac supposedly came to him one day and said: Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say... something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Many parents make mistakes with their children, thinking they know what's best for them… Many years later, if someone asked her where she had come when young, how could she replied: Very nice, and lovable, and worthy to be loved… No one can learn to love by following a manual and no one can learn to write by following a course. I'm not telling you to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.
Joy | Love | Parents | People | Thinking | Writing | Following | Learn |
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment.
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -- or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.
Blame | Future | Inquisitiveness | Writing |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Please accept the fact that the human race is split three ways: some people can take in information by looking at figures, some by looking at graphs, and a third group only by touching it, feeling it, or writing it.
Human race | People | Race | Writing |
Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
People | Unhappiness | Writing | Think |
Pierre Abelard, aka Abailard or Abaelard or Habalaarz
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written in writing what deserves to be read and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.
A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust.
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea at first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.
Writing |
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.