A Quote by Lee Gutkind

The myth of objectivity made nonfiction increasingly unread. In feature articles, we could be playful in the opening and clever in the end but in the middle it was back to the boring basics.

Lee Gutkind

Quote Topics

Articles Back Basics Boring Clever Could End Feature In The End Increasingly Made Middle Myth Nonfiction Objectivity Opening Playful Unread

Quote Author

Lee Gutkind
American - Writer

It is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values, which is distinct from their sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility.

Juliet B. Schor

A plain sock by itself is terribly boring, but it could score points by having a clever stitch pattern, or maybe by being made out of a very beautiful yarn that's an enchantment to work with. (Sadly, it is still infuriatingly true that being beautiful without being clever is almost worth more points than being clever without being beautiful, but such are the rules of life and knitting-they are cruel, but there anyway).

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.

John D'Agata

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

Ross MacDonald

My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.

Billy Collins

If you miss the beginning, the basics, then you are destined to go back and visit the basics.

Buck Brannaman

I did this campaign that was called "Back to the Basics" where I went back to the street, went back to my block, and really felt the people. We've got to go back to that sometimes. We distance ourselves from that and we see it from afar. Some people can't relate back to that; once you're out of it, they don't want to relate back to that. It's always good to get back to the basics, though. You've got to touch the roots, you've got to touch those people. Regardless of what's going on, people always respect that.

Carmelo Anthony

Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.

Heinz von Foerster

We need for America to get back to basics and focus on the middle class's quality of life. Healthcare reform is vital to restoring that standard of living.

Sander Levin

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.

Jamaica Kincaid

As soon as I finished film school I was thinking about, how do I get to feature films? It took about eight years, and I'm still working. Feature films was not the end goal. Feature films was one of the stages. Getting to the point of the Coen brothers or Tarantino, where you're writing your own material and have the budget to do it properly, that's the end goal, and I'm close to that.

Duncan Jones

As I started to read nonfiction in the mid '70s, I discovered, holy cow, there was a lot of imaginative nonfiction. Not the kind where people use composite characters and invented quotes. I hate that kind of nonfiction. But imaginative in the sense that good writing and unexpected structure and vivid reporting could be combined with presenting facts.

David Quammen

After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.

Richard Engel

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.