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Friday, July 30, 2010

On Blogging and Criticism

Famous quotes about writing paraphrased (and bastardized) for your enjoyment and edification:

Where do I find the time for not reading so many blogs?  
~ Karl Kraus (1874-1936)

Your blog is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good
~ Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

The reason why so few good blogs (and newspaper stories) are written is that so few people who can write know anything...including how to write
~ Bastardized by Adoro, original quote by Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) 

Blogs are an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people
~ Philip Guedalla (1889-1944)

Blog:  Something published in haste and regretted at leisure. 
~ Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the blog, as the whore is of the decent woman
~ The Goncourt Brothers, 1858

A well-written blog is almost as rare as a well-spent life
~ Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) (This one is so bastardized it might be my own creation)  

A person who publishes a blog appears willfully in public with his pants down
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

The man who reads blogs is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. 
~ (Bastardized by Adoro, original quote by Thomas Jefferson, i.e. "the man who reads nothing at all"....et al)

A blogger is a lucky person who has found a way to discourse without being interrupted
~ Charles Poore

Journalism largely consists in saying "The Blogger is dead" to people who never knew bloggers even existed.
~  Adoro, orig. G.K. Chesterton 1(1874-1936)

Bloggers have two main problems. One is blogger's block, when the words won't come at all, and the other is logorrhea, when the words come so fast that they should be deleted before they are typed
~ Bastardized by Adoro, albeit true, inspired by original quote by Cecilia Bartholomew 

Blogging is turning one's worst moments into a warning for others
~ Adoro, inspired by J.P. Donleavy

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in blogging
~ Kingsley Amis

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, some resolved to write a blog
~ Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

Asking a blogger what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs
~ Christopher Hampton



When a blog and head collide and there is a hollow sound, is it always from the blog?  
~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)




This one is too good to be misquoted or bastardized:  

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. my opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.  
~ Flannery O'Connor



*** The foundation of all quotes was taken from the anthology 1,911 Best things Anybody Ever Said compiled by Robert Byrne. *****

10 comments:

Mike said...

Very Great Quotes!! Also you have an awesome blog site.

Terry Nelson said...

This is absolutely brilliant Adoro - really! It is the most classic post about blogging/writing I have ever read. Thanks!

Adoro said...

Mike ~ Thanks!

Terry ~ lol...I didn't invent anything new. I just changed the wording a bit to suit the venue. ;-)

What was said in the past about writing certainly applies to blogging and definitely deserves to be made into pot-shots against the hacks involved in journalism in this age!

Larry Denninger said...

Are you taking submissions?

"A person who doesn't read blogs is uninformed, and a person who does read blogs is misinformed."
- Mark Twain

Elizabeth Mahlou said...

Adoro, these are great! I also really like Flannery O'Connor's quote.

Andy said...

Could you please come up with 365 of these? I'd like to have one delivered to my email each day of the year.

Adoro said...

Andy ~ LOL...I'll see what I can do. There really aren't that many great one-liners about writing, but who knows? Maybe something else can be properly bastardized.

Cathy_of_Alex said...

Adoro: I found today's reading from Ecclesiastes particularly apropo.

Katherine said...

Oh this is beyond fab! You need to market it somehow, like the "Quote of the Day" does.

Adoro said...

OK, my "adoring public" has spoken. I'm making it a daily feature!

:-)

(You people are a bad influence...lol)