I Can't Stand A Sentence Until It

I Can't Stand A Sentence Until It Sounds Right.

The Enthusiasm Geologists Show For Adding New Words To Their Conversation Is, If Anything, Exceeded By Their Affection For The Old. They Are Not About To Drop 'granite.' They Say 'granodiorite' When They Are In Church And 'granite' The Rest Of The Week.

On The Geological Time Scale, A Human Lifetime Is Reduced To A Brevity That Is Too Inhibiting To Think About Deep Time. ... Geologists ... See The Unbelievable Swiftness With Which One Evolving Species On The Earth Has Learned To Reach Into The Dirt Of Some Tropical Island And Fling 747s Across The Sky ... Seeing A Race Unaware Of Its Own Instantaneousness In Time, They Can Reel Off All The Species That Have Come And Gone, With Emphasis On Those That Have Specialized Themselves To Death.

A Writer Has To Have Some Kind Of Compulsive Drive To Do His Work. If You Don't Have It, You'd Better Find Another Kind Of Work, Because It's The Only Compulsion That Will Drive You Through The Psychological Nightmares Of Writing.

Writing Is A Suspension Of Life In Order To Re-create Life