Aphorism, of all prose, is the least hospitable.
Aug 202021
Writing
If it had been your exact thought you would have used my exact words.
Jul 262021
Reading great authors improves your writing by making you desperately unhappy with it.
Jun 182021
There is almost nothing that being prefaced with “social” cannot spoil.
Jun 152021
Poetry is language at its limit, as math is logic at its limit; and poetry anxiety, like math anxiety, is only the realization that comprehension requires effort, and the fear that even then it may never arrive.
Jun 102021
Bad writers try to start discussions, good writers try to end them.
May 252021
It is rare, in discursive writing, to encounter an argument at all, let alone a sound one.
May 142021
It is a landmark in a writer’s career when he first finds his work put to purposes of which he does not approve.
May 052021
A two-dollar word will also debit two dollars from your account when you use it incorrectly.
Apr 092021
A regular reviewer, whose fodder must by its nature be mostly mediocre or worse, can discharge his responsibilities to his readers only by continual pans, often of his friends and acquaintances; and this is more than human nature can bear.
Feb 262021
There is a certain type of purveyor of ideas, too stupid to be anything but candid, which makes him useful, like the canary in a coal mine.