Southwest Scriptwriters - Local group promoting new writing for stage, screen, radio and television.
Words Allowed - Promoting performance prose locally: workshops, mailing list, events and contact details.
Rayson, Paul - Writer and poet. Includes selection of work, autobiography and literary links.
Insurance is like marriage. You pay, pay, pay, and you never get anything back.
-- Al Bundy, character on "Married with Children," U.S. television show "Education is a vacine for violence." (Edward James Olmos) Why don't you write books people can read?
-- Nora Joyce, to her husband James "The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties." (Oscar Wilde) Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
-- George Clemenceau Writers' Resources The sun never sets on the British empire because Britain is in the east and the sun sets in the
west.
-- Unknown history student Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain
as marijuana...The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can't
remember what Love thy neighbor, but make sure her husband is away first. Writers' Resources
Our elections are free - it's in the results where eventually we pay.
-- Bill Stern It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
- Oscar Wilde Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.
- Ambrose Bierce Laundry increases exponentially in the number of children.
-- Miriam Robbins "Murderers have been known to find that young girls give them more trouble than anybody else." (Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles) Writers' Resources A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
- Paul Erdos "Have you ever fed your pocket and starved your soul?" (Ivana Santilli, Too Deep) All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
- Ambrose Bierce Writers' Resources
Disclaimer: Even my wife doesn't agree with everything I say, and she loves me dearly. My employers don't love me nearly as much as she does. Draw your own conclusions. Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is
not a conservative, has no brains.
- Sir Winston Churchill If you never want to see a man again, say, "I love you, I want to marry you, I want to have children..." - they leave skid marks. -- Rita Rudner "Marriage excuses no one the freak's roll-call." (Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw) It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.
-- Sydney Smith Writers' Resources "Courage is found in unlikely places." (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien) "Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily." (Napoleon Bonaparte) "Beauty without expression is boring." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) Writers' Resources
My opinions are my wife's, and she says I'm lucky to have them. Men are strong only so long as they represent a strong idea. They become powerless when they
oppose it.
-- Sigmund Freud They're almost inseparable. Sometimes it takes ten people to separate them.
-- Anonymous "Conform and be dull." (J. Frank Doble) To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.
-- Lao Tzu Writers' Resources "I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn't have any brains. I didn't know what I was doing there. That's w The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not
"Eureka!", but "That's funny..."
-- Isaac Asimov "I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is." (Alan Watts) Writers' Resources
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
-- Henry James I think one of the reasons I'm popular again is because I'm wearing a tie. You have to be different.
-- Tony Bennett, 1995 While we are postponing, life speeds by.
- Seneca (3BC - 65AD) "Love is always a stranger in the house of avarice." (Andreas Capellanus) If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.
-- Marcus Aurelius Writers' Resources "In some ways, I never outgrew my adolescence. I wake up in the morning and think, 'Oh my God, I'm late for a math test!' But then I say, 'Wait a minute. I'm 40.'" (Daniel Clowes) Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would
be doing if he were alive today?
1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War.
2) Advising the President.
3) D Writers' Resources
"Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat." (Martin H. Fischer) You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
-- Albert Camus Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle
enough of them.
-- Flannery O'Connor Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment by the corrupt few.
-- George Bernard Shaw "If you light a man a fire, he will be warm for a day; if you light a man on fire, he will be warm for the rest of his life." (Anonymous) Writers' Resources We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution,
of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always
be "Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra) The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one
is.
-- Arnold Bennett Writers' Resources
The mistakes are all waiting to be made.
- chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956) on the game's opening position I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.
-- Wayne Gretzky Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
-- Robert Frost You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don't believe in little
plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can't possibly foresee now.
-- Ha "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." (Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, 1904-1991) Writers' Resources It ain't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so.
-- Will Rogers To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
Andre Gide The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are going.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes Writers' Resources
Why bother with marriage? Just find a woman you hate and buy her a house. Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.
-- Emily Dickinson If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your
thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.
-- Richard Mitchell, from Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.
-- Vernon Law "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." (Albert Einstein) Writers' Resources "I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real senten Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
-- Sun Tzu Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
-- H. L. Mencken Writers' Resources
"By seeing the seed of failure in every success, we remain humble. By seeing the seed of success in every failure we remain hopeful." (Mel Ziegler, founder of Banana Republic) People may or may not say what they mean ... but they always say something designed to get
what they want.
-- David Mamet Value your words. Each one may be the last.
-- Stanislaw J. Lec Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
-- Albert Einstein If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would
be able to endure it.
-- Schopenhauer Writers' Resources Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop
questioning.
-- Albert Einstein "Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free." (James Douglas Morrison, lead singer of The Doors) All marriages are happy. It's living together afterwards that is difficult.
-- Anonymous Writers' Resources
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle
enough of them.
-- Flannery O'Connor "We always get bored with those whom we bore." (François VI Duke (duc) de La Rochefoucauld, 1616-80) Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The
gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
-- Thomas Arnold Bennet If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who,
doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a
machi Lawyers are... operators of the toll bridge which anyone in search of justice must pass.
-- Jane Bryant Quinn Writers' Resources Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
-- T. S. Eliot The real test of friendship is: Can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy
together those moments of life that are utterly simple? They are the moments people looks back
on at Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not
mean his maker, but himself.
-- Dean Inge Writers' Resources
"The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time." (Abraham Lincoln, 1809-65) A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.
-- Elsa Schiapirelli Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God.
-- Herbert Westren Turnbull "Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) I'm worried that the universe will soon need replacing. It's not holding a charge.
-- Edward Chilton Writers' Resources Thank God - every morning when you get up - that you have something to do which must be
done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you
a hundre Journalism consists largely in saying "Lord Jones died" to people who never knew Lord Jones
was alive.
-- G. K. Chesterton It is amazing at how small a price may the wedding ring be placed upon a worthless hand; but, by
the beauty of our law, what heaps of gold are indispensable to take it off!
-- Douglas Jerold, 1858 Writers' Resources
