You can’t write for your betters, and you shouldn’t write for your inferiors. You might as well write what you want to read.
Sep 132022
Writing
If it had been your exact thought you would have used my exact words.
Aug 252022
Bad times to live can be good times to write.
Aug 222022
The typical academic bibliography buries the three books the author has plagiarized among hundreds that he has scarcely opened.
May 092022
The writer who does not disappoint in person has left too little of himself on the page.
May 032022
The crisis is not that the press is distrusted: the press has always been distrusted. The crisis is that this has finally dawned on the press.
Apr 292022
The ability to devise a good story has nothing in common with the ability to write tolerable prose.
Apr 082022
The desires to have one’s work understood, and oneself understood, are nearly opposite, and ought not to share a verb.
Apr 042022
To publish one’s work is to send a grown child out into the world: henceforth it will have to fend for itself.
Mar 212022
The plagiarist, no matter what he says in public, never feels remorse. He regards himself as cheated out of his own thoughts and words by the sheer bad luck of someone else having written them first.
Jan 192022
Our age, for all its weakness, reigns unchallenged in calumny and vitriol: no Mirabeaus, few Robespierres, and everywhere Marats.