R. D. Laing Quotes

A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It's a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer. Furthermore, the writer is not there to see the reaction of the person he writes to, so there's a great unknown to the process that requires a leap of faith. The writer has to choose the right words to express his sentences, and then, once he has sealed the envelope, he has to place those thoughts in the hands of someone else, trusting that the feelings will be delivered, and that the recipient will understand the writer's intent. How childish to think that could be easy.

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.

I write because I don't know how to ask my questions any other way.

Nobody really tells me what's going on, and I find out via the trades myself.

A journalist who doesn't bring a camera is like a warrior who doesn't carry a sword.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

I almost don't know how to write an email.

. . . Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. . . .

There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.

I don't know whether to toss you through that window or shake your hand and say 'Well done'" Henry said in a tired voice.

Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don't tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don't understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions.

A learned man came to me once. He said, "I know the way, -- come." And I was overjoyed at this. Together we hastened. Soon, too soon, were we Where my eyes were useless, And I knew not the ways of my feet. I clung to the hand of my friend; But at last he cried, "I am lost.

You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person.

I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."

Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.

If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, there'd be no work for tinkers' hands

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.

I can't speculate on what did or did not happen. I only know what I said and what I intended to convey.

It's a kind of zen question: if you write a book and no one reads it, is it really a book?