The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.
Interpretation
Writers are inherently wild and free spirits who require solitude to create.
This quote emphasizes the untameable nature of writers, suggesting that their creative spirit cannot be confined by societal norms or expectations. Heinlein implies that the best way to support writers during their intense creative processes is to give them the space they need to explore their thoughts and emotions deeply, free from external pressures.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared the quote to highlight the importance of solitude for creative processes.
The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
An armed society is a polite society.
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment and growth of the arts; not their dimination or destruction.
I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.
The way a character looks reflects what's on the inside. I can make myself look really bad, and I can make myself look kind of gorgeous. It's not about me; it's about the character.
When I'm making stuff, the thing that excites me most is not the result, but the process and trying to do something I've never done before.
I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.
The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.
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