James Jones was not just a good writer but a good man.
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Roger EbertJames Jones
For almost thirty years, James Jones was the friend, and frequently the benefactor, of American writers at home and abroad. Despite his clear importance in the writing community, the academy still largely ignores him. PMLA biographies from 1951 to 1976 list only ten articles about his work in scholarly journals and essay collections, three of which are in publications outside the United States. It often seems that, when academicians remember Jones, it is as the spokesman for an anachronistic male supremacy or as a writer of flawed naturalistic prose.
James Jones
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
William Faulkner
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
Edward Albee
Yesirree, life sure is good.
Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good.
But of course, in books, good is boring.
Good is a snoozer.
Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them.
But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?Douglas Coupland
Journalism is a good place for any writer to start — the retailing of fact is always a useful trade and can it help you learn to appreciate the declarative sentence. A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.
Garrison Keillor
Jones, James
Jones, Jason
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