Quotes 
Last modified Jan 25 2009 (most recent at the top)
Many writers fear that in the future, electronic books will come to
substitute more readily for print books, due to changing audiences and
improved technology. I am skeptical of this--the codex format has
endured for centuries as a simple and elegant answer to the
affordances demanded by print, albeit for a relatively small fraction
of the population. Most people aren't readers--but the people who are
readers will be readers forever, and they are positively pervy for
paper.
From Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow.
Just before Hydes Lane we were accosted by an old drunk called Winston
who asked us where we were from. "Ahh, Australia," he slurred. "You
have the largest barrier reef in the world. You are the largest
consumers of beer in the world. And your capital is Canberra."
I was impressed. Most people think the capital of Australia is Sydney.
"I'm very good at capitals," Winston said proudly. "Ask me any and if I get it right you can buy me a beer."
"Okay," I said. "What's the capital of Burundi?"
After a few minutes of thinking he looked at me with a pained look on his face and whined, "I don't know!" The thought of the beer he'd just missed out on was almost too much for him to bear.
"Oh, don't be mean!" said the GND. "How would he know that? Give him an easy one!"
"Okay," I said, a little chastened. I'd thought the exercise had been to test his knowledge, but it seemed the GND saw it merely as a pretext to hand the guy money. "What's the capital of India?"
"Bombay?" he said hopefully.
"New Delhi, I'm afraid" I went to walk off but the GND hit me.
"Ask him another one. And make it easy!"
"Okay," I said. "What's the capital of the USA?"
"Oh, I know that one," Winston said excitedly, jumping up and down. "New York!"
"That's right," I lied, handing him a dollar.
From The Full Montezuma: Around Central America with the Girl Next Door by Peter Moore.
The helper named Chip says, "Do you recall a lunch meeting with Sonya
Bourne on the thirteenth of July in 2001 at which you two discussed
options grants?"
"Let me see," I say. "2001? Thirteenth of July?" I close my eyes and wait a few seconds, as if I'm concentrating. "Ah, right. Okay. Yes. July 13, 2001. It was a Tuesday. We went to Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. I had a Waldorf salad and a bottle of San Pellegrino. I sent the salad back because there was mayonnaise in the dressing and had them make it again with a vinaigrette dressing, and the waiter said then it won't be a Waldorf salad and I said that's fine, bring me what I want. Waiter's name was Anton. Six-one, slender, brown curly hair. Wore a silver ring on his right hand, middle finger. Timex sport watch on his left wrist. Sonya had a turkey club sandwich, no bacon, light mayo, and a Diet Coke with a wedge of lemon. No, strike that. Wedge of lime. The bill came to twenty-tree dollars and nineteen cents. I left a two-dollar tip. Paid with a Visa card."
Chip scowls. "So, that's a no?"
"Do you remember where you were on some random day five years ago? Come one."
From oPtion$: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs by Fake Steve Jobs (Daniel Lyons).
"Fin, could you help me with a crest?"
"They're not called crests, Short."
"Shields, then."
"Tut-tut. How long have you worked here? The preferred term is coat of arms."
The world of books has no shortage of prigs, which may be why Finster Dapples decided to distinguish himself by slipcasing commonplace pretension in Anglo speech. (How many native New Yorkers say "Tut-tut"?) Finster, far from tracing his roots to a twelfth-century Lincolnshire leasehold, grew up in a Brooklyn housing project. His own coat of arms might well have been crossed stickball bats and cockroaches rampant on a field of cracked concrete.
From The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil.
[National Association of Professional Organizers president Barry]
Izsak says he can prove organizing pays off with a little
demonstration he likes to throw into his presentations. In this
demonstration he takes two decks of cards, one shuffled, and one
ordered by suit and rank, and gives each to a different person. He
then calls out the names of four cards and has the two deck-holders
race to find the cards. Naturally, the person with the ordered deck
always wins handily.
But who puts the neat deck in order? A little experimenting with people of modest card dexterity shows that on average it takes 140 seconds to order a deck, plus another 16 seconds to find four cards in the ordered deck for a total of 156 seconds; it takes about 35 seconds to find four cards in an unsorted deck. One could argue that you only have to order the deck once, and then you can find cards more quickly many times. But in that case, you also need to account for the time it takes to replace the four cards in an ordered deck, about 16 seconds--with cards, as with most things in life, it requires repeated effort to maintain order--compared to the fraction of a second it takes to stick four cards anywhere in an unordered deck. Thus, with a preordered deck, it takes 32 seconds to find and replace four cards, versus 36 seconds with a shuffled deck, giving the preordered deck a 4-second advantage. But since it requires 140 seconds to order the deck, taking that trouble wouldn't pay off unless you need to repeat the task at least thirty-five times, and you're meticulous about maintaining the deck's order between each attempt. In real life, decks tend to get shuffled sooner or later, requiring 140 seconds each time to restore order.
Indeed, organizers freely admit that ongoing maintenance is critical to being organized, and many concede that most clients they organize fail to stick with the program and lapse back into disorder. But that's okay--you just need to have the organizer come back every so often to get back on track.
From A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman.
Showing up is the main thing. Get to the desk regularly. You'll find
you have no end of ideas if you can make writing a regular habit.
Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of being successful in life is
just showing up. We all know this is true. The writers we admire--or
envy--might be geniuses whose talent dwarfs ours, but more often
they're people who show up, with those seven-hundred-page novels
they've been rising at five to write every morning for the past year.
You think, I'm as talented as Anne. I would have done that.
But alas, you have no seven-hundred-page novel. You have six novels,
varying from twenty-five to sixty pages. They're in a drawer or file
cabinet, or even still in computer files. Is the culprit writer's
block? A dearth of ideas? Cruel and fickle fortune? Nope. If you
want to write, you must begin by beginning, continue by continuing,
finish by finishing. This is the great secret of it all. Tell no
one.
From The Writer's Idea Book by Jack Heffron.
People were charmed and captivated--transfixed, really--by the broiling majesty and unnatural might of atomic bombs. When the military started testing nuclear weapons at a dried lakebed called Frenchman Flat in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas it became the town's hottest tourist attraction. People came to Las Vegas not to gamble--or at least not exclusively to gamble--but to stand on the desert's edge, feel the ground shake beneath their feet, and watch the air before them fill with billowing pillars of smoke and dust. Visitors could stay at the Atomic View Motel, order an Atomic Cocktail ("equal parts vodka, brandy, and champagne, with a splash of sherry") in local cocktail lounges, eat an Atomic Hamburger, get an Atomic Hairdo, watch the annual crowning of Miss Atom Bomb or the nightly rhythmic gyrations of a stripper named Candyce King who called herself "the Atomic Blast."
As many as four nuclear detonations a month were conducted in Nevada in the peak years. The mushroom clouds were visible from any parking lot in the city, but most visitors went to the edge of the blast zone itself, often with picnic lunches, to watch the tests and enjoy the fallout afterward. And these were big blasts. Some were seen by airline pilots hundreds of miles out over the Pacific Ocean. Radioactive dust often drifted across Las Vegas, leaving a visible coating on every horizontal surface. After some of the early tests, government technicians in white lab coats went through the city running Geiger counters over everything. People lined up to see how radioactive they were. It was all part of the fun. What a joy it was to be indestructible.
From The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson.
He arrived at the narrow opening where visitors who had successfully
made their way past a metal detector could pass through a turnstile
onto the grounds, once the policeman who controlled the bar of the
turnstile from an adjoining booth was convinced that all of the
criteria for entry had been satisfied.
"Hiya, Eddie," Mike Shanahan said to the policeman, as he got out picture ID that showed him to be a consultant to the mayor's office.
"How you doin', Mikey," the policeman said. The bar remained across the turnstile.
"You want to let me in, Eddie, so I can serve the people of this great city to the best of my ability?"
"We got a security check goin' today, Mike," the policeman said.
He began typing with two fingers on a computer keyboard in order to bring Shanahan's security form up on a monitor that only he could see.
"Didn't we have a security check yesterday?" Shanahan asked.
"That's right. So far, we've had a security check every day this week."
"The mayor particularly worried about the forces of disorder this week?"
"You got it," the policeman said. "Okay. Here we are. Grandmother's maiden name?"
"Eddie, listen: We grew up together. You actually knew my grandmother. Do I really have to tell you her maiden name every day?"
Eddie waited at the computer. Neither he nor Shanahan said anything for a few moments. Finally, Eddie said, "It's a job, Mikey."
"Houlihan," Shanahan said. My grandmother's maiden name was Kate Houlihan."
"And an old dear she was, too," the policeman said, smiling at the memory. "I can still taste those molasses cookies of hers."
He asked Shanahan four more questions that were answered correctly, and then pressed a button to lower the bar on the turnstile. "Take her easy, Mikey," he said, as Shanahan walked toward the building.
Shanahan, showing his pass two or three more times to the people he'd worked with for three years, finally made his way to the mayor's outer office, where Teresa, a secretary he'd slept with off and on for a period of four months earlier in the administration, informed him that any visitor to the mayor's office was now required to peer into a machine that would determine by the iris of his right eye whether or not he was who he said he was.
Shanahan looked at Teresa for a while without saying anything.
Teresa broke the silence. "If what I am witnessing constitutes being rendered speechless by news of this security device," she said, "you should know that being speechless is not a valid excuse. You will have to look into the machine."
"Do you have reason to believe I'm not me?" Shanahan asked.
"I'm pretty sure you're you," Teresa said. "How many people could look that much like the farmer driven out of Ireland by the potato famine? But if you don't let the machine check the iris of your right eye you can't go into the mayor's office."
From Tepper Isn't Going Out by Calvin Trillin.
[Six year old] Zoe looked at me. "You've got good muscles." She
leaned over and felt my bicep, gave it an appreciative pinch.
Sunny [Zoe's mother] laughed. "Stop being a flirt. Honestly, Zoe."
Zoe wheeled on her mother. "You're the one who said it!" The kid could see she'd hit the mark and she pressed her advantage. "You said yourself, Mom. 'Look at that fine spaceman! Don't we know him?' You said that."
"Spaceman?" I said.
"Specimen," Sunny murmured. She was blushing sweetly.
From Which Brings Me to You by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott.
Artists and craftspeople, whose work involves short flashes of intense
concentration followed by long hours of less mentally demanding work,
often fill these hours with audiobooks.
These studio workers are actually following a long tradition of people who have paid money to have stories read to them. In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuban cigar makers hired a lector de tabaqueria to read to them while they worked. One of the most popular books was Alexander Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo. Visions of Mediterranean islands, lost love, and clashing swords so entranced the cigar workers that they ordered the book read again and again. In 1870, the workers wrote to the author and asked his permission to name their cigars in the book's honor, which Dumas granted that year of his death. Thus was born the Montecristo cigar.
From The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life by Steve Leveen.
To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn't treat it as a career.
Despite whatever great artistic sense and talent a man might possess,
he ought to seek money and power elsewhere to avoid forsaking his art
when he fails to receive proper compensation for his gifts and
efforts.
From My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.
[Helene Hanff, author of 84,
Charing Cross Road was a starving playwright in the forties,
and took part-time jobs while working on her plays. At one time she
worked as an "outside reader" for the New York office of one of the
Hollywood studios. Her job was to read one novel per day and
summarize it in one paragraph. For this she would get $6. Sometimes,
she would be asked to write extended summaries of around 10 pages, for
which she would get $10. Here's how she recounts one weekend
multi-volume assignment.]
Well, on the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned to Monograph [the fictionalized name of the studio] and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an English book which was about to be published here. I was to read all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge double money for each. I hurried home with the three volumes and after dinner began to read Volume I. And if Monograph's office had been open at that hour, I'd have phoned and quit my job.
What I had to read, during that nightmare weekend--taking notes on all place names, characters' names and events therein--was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R. Tolkein. (I hope I'm spelling his name wrong.) I remember opening one volume to a first line which read
Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday...
and phoning several friends to say good-bye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages of that.
I also remember the bill I turned in:
Volume I...........$20
Volume II..........$20
Volume III.........$20
Mental Torture..$40
Total.................$100
They paid it.
From Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff.
The clerks in New York City's civil court recently reported that name
changes are at an all time high. Some of the changes are purely, if
bizarrely, aesthetic. A young couple named Natalie Jeremijenko and
Dalton Conley recently renamed their four-year-old son Yo Xing Heyno
Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley.
...
Then there are invented names. Roland G. Fryer, Jr., while discussing his names research on a radio show, took a call from a black woman who was upset with the name just given to her baby niece. It was pronounced shuh-TEED but was in fact spelled "Shithead." Or consider the twin boys OrangeJello and LemonJello, also black, whose parents futher dignified their choice by instituting the pronunciations a-RON-zhello and le-MON-zhello.
Old Maugham [Somerset?], talking to a girls' school about the art of
writing short stories, told them that the essential ingredients were
religion, sex, mystery, high rank, non-literary language and brevity.
The schoolmistress next day told her young charges to try their hand
at writing one according to this recipe. After a minute one said she
had finished. The incredulous mistress told her to read it out, and
she did: 'My God!', said the duchess. 'I'm pregnant. I wonder who
done it.'
--George Lyttelton
For the session this afternoon I have decided to create my own
mathematical theatre exercise. I have printed out the 50 odd numbers
from 9,999,901 to 9,999,999 and give each member of the audience their
own number. We then produce a human version of an ancient Greek way
to find the primes among these numbers, called the sieve of
Eratosthenes. Everyone begins by standing up and waving a number in
the air. As soon as someone finds their number is divisible by three,
say, they sit down, confident that their number is not prime. But
then every third person on from this number will also be divisible by
three so they can sit down too. By sieving through the numbers like
three, five, seven, etc., we begin to sort out the primes from the
non-primes. When I talk to people afterwards they really loved the
exercise. Some people have become very attached to their particular
number. Mathematicians often talk about numbers becoming their
personal friends. It is strange how by making people into numbers
I've animated these numbers in a way I had not anticipated.
--Marcus du Sautoy
From Science, Not Art: Ten Scientists' Diaries edited by Jon Turney
I had to cut back on the smoke after fading out during an early
morning Chinese class and snapping back into a room where everybody
was speaking Cantonese. I had a major panic attack, thought I'd
smoked so much I'd lost the power to comprehend speech.
From He Died with a Felafel in His Hand by John Birmingham
From "The Old Stone Fence" in The Spirit of the Bush by Bruce Venables
I bid good-bye outside Borders, and headed toward Carnaby Street to meet Ian.
Just before I got there I could feel my mobile vibrating in my pocket. Ian's number came up. He was probably ringing to tell me he'd be late.
"Hello?"
"Dan... guess where I am?"
"Somewhere that means you'll be late?"
"I'm nearer than you think."
Ian was being mysterious. It's not good when Ian's being mysterious.
"Where are you? And why are you being mysterious?"
I scanned the road, but couldn't see him anywhere.
"What's the most unlikely vehicle for me to be in right now?"
I re-scanned the road. Virtually opposite me was a huge, white stretch limousine. The type you see over and over again on a Saturday night cruising down Charing Cross Road, and despite knowing that it's either a debauched hen night or some kind of local radio winner, part of you always wonders whether Leo Sayer might pop his head out the door, or you might catch a glimpse of Gary Coleman on his way to some audition or other.
"You're not in the limo, are you?"
"Yep."
"Is Gary Coleman in there?"
"What?"
"What are you doing in the limo?"
"Waving at you!"
I couldn't believe it. I crossed the road, smiling, and stood next to the limousine, studying my own reflection in its blacked-out windows.
"I don't understand!" I said. And I didn't. This wasn't his car. I've been in his car lots of times. I would've remembered it this was it.
"I'm still waving at you, you rude bastard."
I stood there, an incredulous look on my face, and started to wave at the general area where I thought Ian would be sitting. I knocked on the glass, smiling.
"Peter the driver is waving at you now!"
I stepped back and started to wave at Peter the driver. His window wasn't blacked-out, and I continued waving while he just stared at me, a rather worried smile on his face.
"Hello, Peter the driver!" I tried.
"Why don't you come in?" said Ian.
"Okay!" This was exciting. I'd never been in a stretch limo before. I reached for the door handle and tried to open the door. The limo started up and inched away from me slowly. I heard the central locking chunk-click.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"Just standing about."
"In a limo?"
"No, outside Starbucks."
I looked up. Ian was grinning at me, mobile in hand, while I, his supposed friend, was apparently attempting to break into a parked limousine, and waving at God knows who. Maybe one day I'd see Gary Coleman talking about that moment on some confessional chat show as one of the most frightening of his life.
"You tit," I said, as I sat down with my tea.
"I'm sorry. You should have seen your face. I'll pay for your tea by way of apology."
His name, it turned out, was Paul Francis, and the sorry reason his
arm hurt so much was that two days previously he'd wanted to check
whether his mobile phone was working. So he went to a phone box to
give himself a ring. However, when he dialed his own number and his
mobile had gone off in his pocket it gave him such a fright that his
arm involuntarily flew up and he smashed his elbow against the phone
box window. He hadn't been expecting any calls, you see. Not even
from himself.
He was a bear, of course, but not the sort whose predilection for
sylvan defecation is as proverbial as the Holy Father's
Catholicism. This bear, one saw at a glance, had never been to the
woods, let alone behaved irresponsibly there.
From The Burglar in the Rye by Lawrence Block
Once upon a time—before kings and queens were replaced by an act of
Congress and when kissing a frog still sometimes resulted in more than
a case of warts—there lived a young princess named Jennifer.
From A Hidden Magic by Vivian Vande Velde
Since, on these evenings, I came back late, it was a pleasure to be
reunited, in a room no longer hostile, with the bed in which, on the
day of my arrival, I had supposed that it would always be impossible
for me to find any rest, whereas now my weary limbs longed for its
support so that, one after the other, my thighs, my hips and my
shoulders sought to adhere at every point to the sheets that covered
its mattress, as if my fatigue, like a sculptor, had wished to take a
cast of an entire human body.
Allowing yourself to stop reading a book--at page 25, 50, or even,
less frequently, a few chapters from the end--is a rite of passage in
a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a
communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce:
Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.
...
Now, thanks to maturity, or psychotherapy, or the simple fact that as I get older I have a lot less time and even less patience, I have given up my membership in the book equivalent of the Clean Plate Club. If I don't like it, I stop reading.
...
Letting myself off the hook has been beneficial in any number of ways, not the least of which is that it gives me more time to devote to books I actually do like. And, I suppose, knowing I don't have to finish everything I start makes me braver in making out-of-the-mainstream choices in the first place. If I were still laboring under the assumption that an unfinished book would screw up my reading GPA, I might never have tried to fathom Vaclav Havel, for instance. (Never mind that that 'tried' comes with an elliptical but understood 'and failed.)'
From So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson
Painter Georges Seurat laments that the woman who'll wait for you to
finish working isn't the woman you want to find waiting when you
finish work. But, for consolation, you have the work. 'Look, I
made a hat. Where there never was a hat.'
From A Pound of Paper by John Baxter
There is also the joke about the English tourist in the French cafe.From A Pound of Paper by John Baxter
