writing

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.

Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think how opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners themselves tend to be. Nobody talks much about the muscular limbs, dark, swollen buds, strip-tease trees and unholy beauty that have made us all slaves of the Goddess Flora.

A writer is someone for whom writing is much harder than it is for the others.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Yes, there is a Nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

I once heard a learned man say, "Every evil has its remedy, except folly. To reprimand an obstinate fool or to preach to a dolt is like writing upon the water. Christ healed the blind, the halt, the palsied, and the leprous. But the fool He could not cure."

An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many, and grows old in their sick hearts.

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust.

Such is the stuff of waking nightmares, incipient madness, the sort of now-bewildered but soon-to-be-deranged thoughts that cause once well-balanced people to peek under their beds at night, suspect that their phones are tapped, and, in time, become certain that sinister forces are monitoring their every move. Maybe it's the government, maybe it's the Trilateral Commission, maybe it's the saucer people. You can't trust anyone because anyone and everyone may be one of Them or on of Their Agents. And pretty soon you begin writing long letters to the editor of Scientific American, or maybe you don't because the editors are probably part of the conspiracy too. And you think about lining your room with aluminum foil to keep the radio waves out, and at night you roam the streets spray-painting mystic symbols on the walls to repel strange forces, and all the while you gibber to yourself and what you say makes sense to you if to no one else, and in the end you put your belongings in a shopping bag, better to be mobile, and you look for a dark place you can hide during the daylight hours, because They are out there, and They are searching, and They want you in their crosshairs. . . . The headshrinkers call it paranoia, and when it gets bad they put you away. Because, after all, people who think everyone in the world wants to kill them can be dangerous.

The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt.