Saturday

Nov. 29, 1997

Bonie Doon

by Robert Burns

SATURDAY  11/29

Today's Reading:  "Bonie Doon" by Robert Burns.

The popular children's television show "Kukla, Fran and  Ollie" premiered on this day in 1948.

Writer Madeleine L'Engle, author of the prize-winning children's book A WRINKLE IN TIME, was born in New York City in 1918.

Christian writer C.S. Lewis  was born in Belfast, Ireland, 1898.  "What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which I have always suffered.  [As a child] I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines.  Many sheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn from my hopeless failures in tears.  As a last resort... I was driven to write stories instead, little dreaming to what a world of happiness I was being admitted.  You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best  cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table."

Director Busby Berkeley (42ND STREET, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935) was born in Los Angeles in 1895.

Novelist Louisa May Alcott, author of LITTLE WOMEN, was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1832.

Physicist Christian Johann Doppler, best known for his explanation of perceived frequency variation of sound and light waves due to the relative motion of the source and the sensor - the Doppler effect, was born in Salzburg, Austria, 1803.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
  • “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.” —Shelby Foote
  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
  • “Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.” —Anthony Powell
  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
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