James Richardson Quotes

Too much apology doubles the offense.

Nothing important comes with instructions.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

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Sophistication is upscale conformity.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.

There are silences harder to take back than words.

If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.

Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.

How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.

Anger has been ready to be angry.

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.