Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the joy of creation through writing, emphasizing the author's affinity for words as a medium of expression.
In this quote, P. J. O'Rourke expresses a personal passion for writing, highlighting that his skill lies in manipulating words to create meaningful content. It illustrates the idea that creativity can emerge from one's personal strengths, and that writing serves as both a form of expression and a way to construct tangible forms of art.
In practice
When speaking at a literary event, one might use this quote to emphasize the significance of writing in the creative process.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
Because hereβs the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.
Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.
It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.
Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.
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