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随机生存的智慧：黑天鹅语录 THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
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Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
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Most people write so they can remember things; I write to forget.
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What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.
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Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
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Critics may appear to blame the author for not writing the book they wanted to read; but in truth they are blaming him for writing the book they wanted, but were unable, to write.
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Literature is not about promoting qualities, rather, airbrushing (your) defects.
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For pleasure, read one chapter by Nabokov. For punishment, two.
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There is a distinction between expressive hypochondria and literature, just as there is one between self-help and philosophy.
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You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
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No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.
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Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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Just as there are authors who enjoy having written and others who enjoy writing, there are books you enjoy reading and others you enjoy having read.
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A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities.
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With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics read the footnotes and skip the text, and with business books skip both text and footnotes.
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Double a man’s erudition; you will halve his citations.
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Losers, when commenting on the works of someone patently more impressive, feel obligated to unnecessarily bring down their subject by expressing what he is not: “he is not a genius, but…”, “while he is no Leonardo” instead of expressing what he is.
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You are alive in inverse proportions to clichés in your writing.
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What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
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Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such boring tasks.
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The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers, painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail.
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It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.
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I can predict when an author is about to plagiarize me, and poorly so when he writes that Taleb “popularized” the theory of Black Swan events.
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Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf persons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering, “what’s the point?”
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