Neal Asher Quotes

The words I overuse are all adverbs.

I overuse words. My kids catch me saying stuff. They're like, 'Hey, you say that all the time.' 'Boom' is one of those things.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of 'like' has spread through the idiom of the young. And it's true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.

I try to avoid saying 'fantastic' too often and 'obviously' is a dangerous word for all broadcasters.

Just because I have a good vocabulary, I don't think of myself as anachronistic - just because I try not to use the word 'like' every other word.

As you can imagine, there were people who were like, "Why are you being the PC cop?" or, "This is Orwellian to tell people to stop using the word 'illegal' to refer to people." Well, I just want people to think it through.

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

Mistakes are a fact of life. If you are willing to be wrong then you have earned the right to be right.

For some reason, we see divorce as a signal of failure, despite the fact that each of us has a right, and an obligation, to rectify any other mistake we make in life.

Neither let mistakes and wrong directions - of which every man, in his studies and elsewhere, falls into many - discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding that we are wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right, he will grow daily more and more right. It is, at bottom, the condition which all men have to cultivate themselves. Our very walking is an incessant falling - a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement! - it is emblematic of all things a man does.

Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.

I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice.

By three things the wise person may be known. What three? He sees a shortcoming as it is. When he sees it, he tries to correct it. And when another acknowledges a shortcoming, the wise one forgives it as he should.

This self-reflection, this willingness to examine ourselves, to make corrections, to do better, that's part of what makes us Americans. It's part of what sets us apart from other nations, the United States is the most professional, most capable, most cutting-edge intelligence community in the world.

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

We can often do more for other men by trying to correct our own faults than by trying to correct theirs.

It is said that one should not hesitate to correct himself when he has made a mistake. If he corrects himself without the least bit of delay, his mistakes will disappear.

Nothing will serve you better than a strong work ethic. Nothing. And it's something that you can't teach. You have to be thrown into it, where you're going to sink or swim. It's amazing how self-correcting and how clarifying a good, hard, shitty job can be. Because at the end of the day, any profession I've seen anybody in, when you peer behind the curtains of Oh, wouldn't that be a great job? Wow, what an amazing thing, a philanthropic endeavor! it really just comes down to It's a f**king grind.

Remedy your deficiencies, and your merits will take care of themselves. Every man has in him good and evil. His good is his valiant army, his evil is his corrupt commissariat; reform the commissariat and the army will do its duty.

I think it is in the nature of individuals and individual entities not to self-correct.

If I learned all this so slowly it was because I learned by my mistakes, and some time always elapses between making a mistake and realizing it, and more time between realizing it and exactly determining it.

Be sensitive to your mistakes. Put it on the wall for a couple of weeks. It may be that you can learn more from the study of your own work than from others.

I'm always sort of optimistic about how good we are, as a country, at fixing ourselves.