A Quote by Miles Kington

So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience.

Miles Kington

Quote Topics

Audience Card Equivalent Exclamation Failure Far Goes Good Good Writing Holding Laughter Literary Man Mark Reading Sign Studio Up Use Writing

Quote Author

Miles Kington
British - Journalist
May 13, 1941 - January 30, 2008

There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.

Max Beerbohm

Indulging in unrestrained and immoderate laughter is a sign of intemperance, of a want of control over one's emotions, and of failure to repress the soul's frivolity by a stern use of reason.

Saint Basil

The knowledgeable person lives with a question mark '?' and the man of awe and wonder lives with an exclamation mark.

Rajneesh

I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.

Robert J. Sawyer

I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.

Rosemary Clement-Moore

Even as she'd been writing it, she wondered if she was using too many exclamation marks, but she was glad she left them in. Nothing says "all is good in the world" like exclamation marks, after all.

Derek Landy

A tired exclamation mark is a question mark.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

John Green

You may have an older audience in front of you holding the Bible and a younger audience holding an iPhone. You don't want to lose either audience.

Tony Evans

Remember that sign they hung up in an EPA office during the Reagan administration, "No good deed goes unpunished"? Under George Bush, no good science goes unpunished.

David Helvarg

Give the villagers village arithmetic, village geography, village history and the literary knowledge that they must use daily, i.e. reading and writing letters, etc.

Mahatma Gandhi

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

Mark Twain

THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.

Edmond Jabes

The Great Depression was not a sign of the failure of monetary policy or a result of the failure of the market system as was widely interpreted. It was instead a consequence of a very serious government failure, in particular a failure in the monetary authorities to do what they'd initially been set up to do.