Divinipotent About Editors v. Writers

"Editing is the same as quarreling with writers — same thing exactly."
~ Harold Ross

Just like labor and management, liberals and conservatives, parents and teenagers and the Yankees and the Red Sox, editors and writers are engaged in an endless, ritualized struggle for dominance. We writers agonize over our words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters; we come to love them and want to protect them. But editors believe they stand for the reader. They hate the words that slow them, confuse them or drive them to unplanned reverie about laundry loads and grocery lists. And so the struggle continues.

However, on the subject of censorship, writers and editors stand with arms linked, feet planted firmly, minds finally in agreement. This is Banned Books Week. Keep the harmony going and help fight censorship.

"Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive."
~ Raymond Chandler

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
~ T. S. Eliot

Divinipotent About Scientific Research

"Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary."
~ Albert Einstein

In an article titled "A Life of Its Own" in the September 28, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Michael Specter writes about scientists on the front lines of synthetic biology, people who are "combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology" to construct new forms of life, from clean energy sources to disease-free humans.

With that in mind, in Banned Books Week 2009, Divinipotent Daily stops to ponder science texts — works that, unlike literature, can lead to the permanent physical alteration of our world. Some lobby to restrict both scientific research and the information derived from it. But the reality is, Pandora's box is open, and its secrets cannot be recalled. Close observation and what Einstein called "value judgments of all kinds" about science are the only recourse for those outside the laboratory's domain.

"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me Man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?"
~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus)

Divinipotent About Writers and Writing

It's Banned Books Week. Today, someone in a nearby city, town or school system will try to hide a writer's work from the eyes of others. To learn how to help fight censorship, go to http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/

Now, some uncensored words from writers about their work.

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
~ Albert Camus

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
~ Thomas Mann

"Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write."
~ Robert Penn Warren

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."
~ Oscar Wilde

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining…researching…talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
~ E.L. Doctorow

"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
~ Somerset Maugham

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make."
~ Truman Capote

"You become a writer because you need to become a writer — nothing else."
~ Grace Paley

"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
~ Lillian Hellman