Irrelevant Details Quotes

He knew he couldn't tell stories, that he always included extraneous details & tangents that interested only him.

If I was reading a book about a comedian, I wouldn't really care too much about their childhood.

Too much information about nothing.

Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?

Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

No one cares what you ate for breakfast. Unless it's something really spectacular, don't tweet me your breakfast, I don't care.

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

Nobody cares about your wardrobe, what your tie looks like, or even if you're wearing one, and I don't.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?

I am told by others that I have a lateral-thinking, broad approach to problems, sometimes to my detriment. In school, my grades always suffered because I was continually mucking about with irrelevant side issues, which I often found to be more interesting.

It's not worth getting into the bullshit to see what the bull ate.

I'm much more interested in what an actor has to say about something substantial and important than who they're dating or what clothes they're wearing or some other asinine, insignificant aspect of their life.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.