Noah Lukeman Quotes

It is not uncommon for a leader to win a debate - or even an election - who is intellectually inferior to his opponent but is better able to incite the emotions of the masses.

The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory.

Despite popular conviction, a writer needn't wear black, be unshaven, sickly and parade around New York's East Village spewing aphorisms and scaring children.

Unfortunately, these days, 'literary' writing seems to have become synonymous with 'showy' writing, writing that is beautiful but doesn't tell a story. This is a misguided trend. If today's 'literary' writers would look back only one or two hundred years at real literary writers like Dostoyevsky, Poe, Conrad, Melville, they would find momentous stories
not just pretty writing
at the core of almost all of their great works.

We listen to and interact with others all day long, but rarely do we hear them, take them for who they are; instead we create an image of who we want them to be. We might unconsciously skip over their faults. We can wear blinders for many reasons. Sometimes faults are indeed seen, but then are justified, dismissed, diminished.
Seeing other people for who they are is not as easy as it may seem; to wake up one day and remove your blinders and acknowledge something for what it is (especially if it has been harmful) is, at the same time, to acknowledge that you had been wrong in your judgement. It would force us to face ourselves, to travel down the road of self-realization. This, for most people, is scarier than anything; many would rather live with the harmful person than come to such an admission about their own judgement.
So we live, instead, with blinders on about others. Until one day, if we're lucky, we can wake up and see people for who they are really are.

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread.

Subtlety is the mark of confidence and is thus by far the hardest thing for a writer to achieve.