American Editor Quotes

Carl Sandburg

Anna Wintour

Robert Silverberg

Frederik Pohl

Donald Barthelme

John W. Campbell

Victoria Woodhull

I have always fought for ideas — until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

Margaret Caroline Anderson

Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.

Tim Cahill (writer)

About C. S. Lewis:

I once asked how he managed to write with such ease, and I think his answer tells us more about his writing than anything else he said. He told me that the thing he loved most about writing was that it did two things at once. This he illustrated by saying: "I don't know what I mean till I see what I've said."

The mind revels in conjecture. Where information is lacking, it will gladly fill in the gaps.

And long shall timorous fancy see The painted chief, and pointed spear, And Reason's self shall bow the knee To shadows and delusions here.

Philip Morin Freneau

My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times.
I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don't know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

To all who want to accomplish something I say, Go into the silence regularly for power and wisdom to accomplish.

Elizabeth Towne

We know people by their stories: their history, their habits, their secrets, their triumphs and failures. We know them by what they do. We want to know mountains too, but they've got no story. So we do the next best thing. We throw ourselves onto them and make the stories happen.

At a ballgame, as in a place of worship, no one is alone in the crowd.

In matching your wits against yourself you take on the shrewdest and wiliest antagonist you can have, and consequently a victorious outcome in this duel of wits brings a great feeling of triumph.

Dorothea Brande

Liquor is not a necessity. It is a means of momentarily sidestepping necessity.

Clifton Fadiman

Black is the hardest color in the world to get right-except for gray...

I carry her with me now like a loose sweater that sucks out the chill on a snowy winter night.

Pinkie Gordon Lane

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

Donald Barthelme

Canadian is both harder and easier to explain. Nobody knows what it is even supposed to be, let far-out-alone what it actually is.

O for a lodge in a garden of cucumbers!
O for an iceberg or two at control!
O for a vale that at midday the dew cumbers!
O for a pleasure trip up to the pole!

Rossiter Johnson

Her suffering ended with the day,
Yet lived she at its close,
And breathed the long, long night away
In statue-like repose. But when the sun in all his state
Illumed the eastern skies,
She passed through Glory's morning-gate,
And walked in Paradise.

Garden: One of a vast number of free outdoor restaurants operated by charity-minded amateurs in an effort to provide healthful, balanced meals for insects, birds and animals.

You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose. Space is a puff of smoke, a wisp of cloud.

David Wong (writer)

Poetry, perhaps the finest of fine arts, certainly the shynest and most elusive?, poetry which must have listeners, which cannot sing into a void.

A city of strivers pushing forward from immigrant enclaves.

Grace Mirabella

Sport, which mimics the language and emotional intensity of war but eliminates
the fatal destruction, may be a form of redemption.

The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life.

Henry Mills Alden

In general, 'the market' is smarter than the smartest of its individual participants.

Robert L. Bartley

Above the warehouse and beneath the stars The poets creep on the harp of the Bridge. But see, They fall into the National Cold Storage Company One by one. The wind off the river is too cold, Or the times too rough, or the Bridge Is not a harp at all. Or maybe A monstrous birth inside the warehouse Must be fed by everything—ships, poems, Stars, all the years of our lives.

Harvey Shapiro (poet)