Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the joy of creation through writing, emphasizing the author's affinity for words as a medium of expression.
In this quote, P. J. O'Rourke expresses a personal passion for writing, highlighting that his skill lies in manipulating words to create meaningful content. It illustrates the idea that creativity can emerge from one's personal strengths, and that writing serves as both a form of expression and a way to construct tangible forms of art.
In practice
When speaking at a literary event, one might use this quote to emphasize the significance of writing in the creative process.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Writing is a struggle against silence.
The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
That which is creative must create itself.
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
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