"Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal."

Amis, Martin on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience."

Barthes, Roland on writers and writing   

"On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox."

Baudelaire, Charles on writers and writing   

"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."

Berger, Thomas on writers and writing
4 fans of this quote   

"If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!"

Collins, Jackie on writers and writing   

"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."

Churchill, Winston on writers and writing
7 fans of this quote   

"Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic."

Burchill, Julie on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"Great writers are the saints for the godless."

Brookner, Anita on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul."

Brodsky, Joseph on writers and writing   

"Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them."

Bowen, Catherine Drinker on writers and writing   

"No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write."

Boileau, Nicholas on writers and writing
5 fans of this quote   

"America is just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Thompson, Hunter S. on america   

"Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism -- and the best journalists have always known this. True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character."

Thompson, Hunter S. on journalism and journalists
5 fans of this quote   

"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of history it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time -- and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."

Thompson, Hunter S. on twentieth century
3 fans of this quote   

"If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people -- including me -- would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."

Thompson, Hunter S. on journalism and journalists
7 fans of this quote   

"Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect."

Thompson, Hunter S. on law and lawyers   

"Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final."

Thompson, Hunter S. on myth   

"Publishers are notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they're attached to dollar signs -- unlike journalists, quarterbacks, and felony criminal defendants who tend to be keenly aware of numbers at all times."

Thompson, Hunter S. on publishing and publishers   

"That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer -- he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation."

Thompson, Hunter S. on boxing   

"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours."

Thompson, Hunter S. on truth   

"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."

Mencken, H. L. on doubt   

"Don't overestimate the decency of the human race."

Mencken, H. L. on decency
3 fans of this quote   

"I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success."

Hemingway, Ernest on doctors   

"The practice of medicine is a thinker's art, the practice of surgery a plumber s."

Fisher, Martin H. on doctors   

"The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes."

Erasmus, Desiderius on doctors
3 fans of this quote   

"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge."

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan on doctors   

"Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals."

Bonaparte, Napoleon on doctors
3 fans of this quote   

"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died."

Bombeck, Erma on doctors
5 fans of this quote   

"One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth."

Berger, John on doctors
3 fans of this quote   

"When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much."

Bagnold, Enid on doctors
3 fans of this quote   

"Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult."

Hippocrates on doctors
8 fans of this quote   

"It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying."

Horder, Thomas on doctors
3 fans of this quote   

"I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience."

James, Alice on doctors   

"Is my dentist not bound by the Geneva Convention? "

Kocher, Gerhard on doctors   

"The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death."

White, Ellen Gould on doctors   

"I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age."

Voltaire on doctors
7 fans of this quote   

"He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals."

Twain, Mark on doctors
12 fans of this quote   

"There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse."

Sterne, Laurence on doctors   

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"A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own."

Auden, W. H. on doctors
3 fans of this quote   

"The superior doctor prevents sickness; The mediocre doctor attends to impending sickness; The inferior doctor treats actual sickness;"

Proverb, Chinese on doctors
7 fans of this quote