You can’t write clearly without generalizations, and these are mine.
— Nick Cohen, in his book "What's Left?".
I just stopped. My goal was provisional and modest: one month without drinking. For the first few weeks, this wasn’t easy. I had to break the habits of a lifetime. But I did some mechanical things. I created a mantra for myself, saying over and over again, I will live my life from now…
Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong…
— Nick Cohen, in his book “What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way”.
Excessive generalization is a temptation for all original thinkers, who are usually in love with their own ideas and who therefore overvalue them. Perhaps novel and unpopular ideas would never win a hearing unless their originators were entirely convinced that they were…
Novelists have two ways of talking about themselves. One in which they do a very good job of pretending to be reasonably modest individuals with fairly realistic opinions of their own powers and not atrociously ungenerous in their assessments of their…