W.J. Raymond Quotes

They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.

He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.

Every person you encounter, whom you interact with, is there to teach you something. Sometimes it may be years before you realize what each had to show you.

I know you'll think this odd, but I find it strangely exhilarating not knowing what's coming next.

If I leave my computer, I'm probably not going to get back for hours. If I take a few minutes to answer questions and go web surfing, then guilt kicks in and I get back to work.

One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an old young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell.

Neal had a couple of good ideas and they fit nicely, so that's the way I decided to go.

Asking what the question is, and why the question is asked, is always asking a pertinent question.

Industrial design keeps the customer happy, his client in the black and the designer busy.

I was very influenced by comics. The drawing style, definitely, I was interested in. My style of drawing is largely a comic style, but it's also much more obvious than comics.

Sometimes there's a vacuum that has to be covered.

Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

When I see a train, I want to take it in my arms.

It's an extreme to go from an artist like myself to a commercial artist with art directors looking over your shoulder, or any other knucklehead telling you what your art should look like.

I really don't see any influence of my work on any artists. But I do think I've had an influence on drawings' being shown. I've had an influence on the economics of it.

To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.

All confessions are Odysseys.

We should imitate the great classics. We would miss, and that miss would be our originality.

Scientific medicine is one of the greatest triumphs of humankind.

If from poetry we expect a succession of signals for the release of miscellaneous private emotion we are likely to find Tears, Idle Tears valuable.

Now is the dwelling place of God himself.

[Homeschooling]...recipe for genius: More of family and less of school, more of parents and less of peers, more creative freedom and less formal lessons.

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

It is not in novelty but in habit that we find the greatest pleasure.

Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.

There is no system that is inherently moral if the participants themselves are not.

The main professional responsibility of a person in business is business.

No' is the second shortest word in the English language, but one of the hardest to say.

Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.

Whatever's most important to you is your god. If it's not the Rock Christ Jesus, then it's sand!

To me when a mother puts food in a microwave for her children, it is an act of hate

I love the opportunity to just let my imagination run riot! Non-fiction can be very restrictive.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

Writers will be judged by what they write.

The original Upper Paleolithic people would, if they appeared among us today, be called Caucasoid, in the sense that they lacked the particular traits we associate with Negroid and Mongoloid types.

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

California, the department store state.

California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing.

I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.

Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.