Daily Archives: June 2, 2012

I’m a writer and I don’t get no respect

Writer Gets No Respect

Critics are everywhere.

One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers. –Wilfrid Sheed

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. –Antonin Artaud

The noted writer Theodore Sturgeon was once asked why so much of science fiction writing was “crap.” He paused for a moment, nodded, and said, yes, 90 percent of science fiction was crap, but that “90 percent of everything is crap.” This is known as Sturgeon’s Law, and is just as true today as it was in the early 1950s when he first pronounced it.

Same is true for critics of writers and writing.

[Errata: I had originally and erroneously attributed this to Robert Heinlein, another noted writer of such classics as Stranger in a Strange Land. My apologies and thank to Tom Dupree for pointing out my error. It is good to have smarter readers dropping by to read your blog posts. May we all be so fortunate. Thank you to all who stop by, read, like, and comment. It is one of the advantages of this blog format. Thank you all. –Editor]

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Filed under cartoon by author, no respect, writer