72. The Joys of Writing: Some Quotes

From: Wim Kayser A Glorious Accident

Sacks – on writing
“… I write by hand. Never computers. I’m computer illiterate. I’m afraid I might erase everything. I do like the mechanical heaviness of this typewriter, but most of all I like to write by hand… I often do little pictures as well, and I write in different colours. Sometimes little diagrams … basically I travel everywhere with pen and paper. All my books were written like this. In my house you’d see a whole roomful. I have my notebook with me now…”

Sacks: “The brain is not a computer, it is an orchestra of a thousand musicians; it is a work of art.”

Haldane: “The universe is not only weirder than we ever imagined it, it is even weirder than we can imagine.”

Dennett: “We are all faced with the baffling phenomenon: how could anything be more familiar and at the same time more weird than the mind? .”

Sacks: “… we are not blanks at birth’ we are really a billion years old.”

Matthew Arnold: “Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret to style.”

And a final joyful puzzle for people who like unlikely sentence constructions:

What are you like on stringing prepositions together? Could you manage to write a grammatically correct sentence using nine prepositions consecutively?

“…There was a little boy who, it is said, disliked a book about Australia that his mother was fond of reading to him at bedtime and (who) finally demanded, ‘What have you brought that book I don’t like being read to out of about Down Under up for?’”