James Richardson Quotes

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

Nothing important comes with instructions.

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.

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

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

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

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.

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.

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

Anger has been ready to be angry.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.

I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.

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Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

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

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

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

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

I'm a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions: are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?

Too much apology doubles the offense.

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

They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence ... to productivity. And they're happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.

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

There are silences harder to take back than words.

Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.

I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.