Top 16 Quotes & Sayings by George V. Higgins

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer George V. Higgins.
Last updated on September 30, 2024.
George V. Higgins

George V. Higgins was an American author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, raconteur and college professor. He authored more than thirty books, including Bomber's Law, Trust, and Kennedy for the Defense, and is best known for his bestselling crime novels, including The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which established the Boston noir genre of gangster tales that spawned several popular films by followers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist.
Egotism: The art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
What You Lose on the Swings You Make Up on the Merry-Go-Round. — © George V. Higgins
What You Lose on the Swings You Make Up on the Merry-Go-Round.
Life is hard but being stupid makes it harder.
Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.
Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.
Rental formal wear of the sky-blue, brocade and shiny varieties is favored by upwardly mobile young gangsters drafted as groomsmen for weddings.
Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance.
The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.
You cannot write well without data.
The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play.
The seductiveness of baseball is that almost everyone with an abiding interest in it knows exactly how it should be played. And secretly believes that he could do it, if only God had seen fit to make him just a little bit less clumsy.
Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
A cop told me, a long time ago, that there’s no substitute for knowing what you’re doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that’re any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it.
Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.
The received image of a writer is that of an unproductive sensitive who suffers from the vapors, is enslaved by his gonads, falls victim to romantic swoons and passes out at deadlines.
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