James Richardson Quotes

“Sophistication is upscale conformity.”

— James Richardson

“Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.”

— James Richardson

“There are silences harder to take back than words.”

— James Richardson

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

— James Richardson

To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.

— James Richardson

“Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.”

— James Richardson

“If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.”

— James Richardson

If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.

— James Richardson

“Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.”

— James Richardson

“Here in the last minutes, the very end of the world, someone's tightening a screw thinner than an eyelash, someone with slim wrists is straightening flowers ...”

— James Richardson

“When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.”

— James Richardson

“They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence ... to productivity. And they're happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.”

— James Richardson

The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.

— James Richardson

God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.

— James Richardson

The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.

— James Richardson

“Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.”

— James Richardson

Anger has been ready to be angry.

— James Richardson

“Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.”

— James Richardson

“It's amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?”

— James Richardson

“Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren't hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.”

— James Richardson

“I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.”

— James Richardson

“Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money.”

— James Richardson

“I'll buy that means also I believe it.”

— James Richardson

“Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.”

— James Richardson

Judging itself brings the pain of being judged. The wicked judge mistakes this for another crime of the accused and lengthens his sentence.

— James Richardson

“Too much apology doubles the offense.”

— James Richardson

“The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.”

— James Richardson

“Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.”

— James Richardson

“The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.”

— James Richardson

“Happiness is the readiness to be happy.”

— James Richardson

“Patience is decisive indecision.”

— James Richardson

“Hasn't there ... been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.”

— James Richardson

“The drives were nature's first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world's obstacles to them.”

— James Richardson

“There are crimes I don't commit mainly because I don't want to find out I could.”

— James Richardson

“Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.”

— James Richardson

“The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want.”

— James Richardson

“Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don't understand.”

— James Richardson

“Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.”

— James Richardson

“I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing.”

— James Richardson

“The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.”

— James Richardson

“If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.”

— James Richardson

“Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into.”

— James Richardson

“I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.”

— James Richardson

“A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.”

— James Richardson

What I'm not changes more than what I am.

— James Richardson

“Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.”

— James Richardson

“Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.”

— James Richardson

“That others know: science. That others choose: politics.”

— James Richardson

“There is no road to the land without roads.”

— James Richardson

I'm sitting here bored, ... trying to remember that everything is a complete mystery.

— James Richardson