“It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.” — David Brooks - The Service Patch - NYTimes.com
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“It’s painful for most software developers to acknowledge this, because they love code so much, but the best code is no code at all. Every new line of code you willingly bring into the world is code that has to be debugged, code that has to be read and understood, code that has to be supported. Every time you write new code, you should do so reluctantly, under duress, because you completely exhausted all your other options. Code is only our enemy because there are so many of us programmers writing so damn much of it. If you can’t get away with no code, the next best thing is to start with brevity.” —
Coding Horror: The Best Code is No Code At All
Substitute the word “poetry” for “code”, and this makes a whole lot of sense, too:
It’s painful for most poets to acknowledge this, because they love poetry so much, but the best poetry is no poetry at all. Every new line of poetry you willingly bring into the world is poetry that has to be revised, poetry that has to be read and understood, poetry that has to be declaimed. Every time you write new poems, you should do so reluctantly, under duress, because you completely exhausted all your other options. Poetry is only our enemy because there are so many of us poets writing so damn much of it. If you can’t get away with no poetry, the next best thing is to start with brevity.
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Have we learned NOTHING from Planet of the Apes?As bizarre as the notion of employing monkeys as soldiers seems, the possibility has occurred to military commanders seeking secret weapons and surprise tactics. Monkeys’ intelligence, physical agility, ability to emulate humans, and capability to manipulate simple mechanisms means that they are easily trained to play a role in warfare.
(Source: azspot)
“Every story doesn’t need a sequel, prequel, trilogy, saga, or series.” — The End: Why You Don’t Need A Sequel To Everything. — First Today, Then Tomorrow
“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.” — Ernest Hemmingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald re: Tender is the Night, via “I Liked It And I Didn’t” - The Rumpus.net