Ken Kesey on writing

You can’t bomb for a humane reason. What we should do is just Mother Teresa them to death with love. It’s that old hippie nonsense but it’s still the best stuff there is.

The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful.

Doing magic, you not only have to be able to do a trick, you have to have a little story line to go with it. And writing is essentially a trick.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778

• Love

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Reading