Terry Teachout Quotes

In the course of writing one historical book or another, it has happened that I could hardly restrain myself from simply copying entire documents. Indeed, I sometimes sank down among the documents and said to myself, I can't improve on these.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

I kind of embarked on a fruitless search to find information about my character, Frederick Aiken. And it was fruitless, unfortunately, because there's so little about him.

I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.

With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.

No biographical subject is ever on hold with the orthodontist. If there's a dry spell, it's your job to curtail or eliminate it.

Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.

There were no clippings of Ambedkar. The only thing I had was a two-and-a-half minute film which I saw countless times. Nobody knows how he walked, how he spoke, or how he behaved. I had to conceive all those things in my mind. I had to work a lot on the make-up, too.

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

Whenever I felt tempted to, I don’t know, watch cat videos or bad Netflix TV instead of writing this Brandeis biography, I thought of his stern but kindly visage and buckled down and wrote the damn thing, because there’s so much information out there, and these are such anxious times in democracy, such unreasonable times.

I've been reading the books. It's the origination, it's the primary source. You should always go back to the books.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

If everything was perfect, it would always be a person-first conversation, but whenever I have the opportunity, I lead with my personality. If they're looking and seeing the disability first or the chair first, I know that I have the ability to change that.

Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.

I don't drive, so one of my assistants drives me to my writing room, and I have a calendar on the wall telling me how much time I have left, and how far behind I am. I look at it and panic, and decide which scene to work on. And you sit there plonking notes until something makes sense, and you don't think about it any more. Good tunes come when you're not thinking about it.

My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school.

Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing. ...I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now.

Don't you think that's the main reason people find [writing] so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.

What writing ROOM taught me was that I know exactly how to be the perfect mother, but I'm not willing to do it for more than ten minutes at a time.

Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.