He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of char...acter. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary, above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the wife of an executive would be a better wife had she been a secretary first. As a secretary, you learn to adjust to the bos...s's moods. Many marriages would be happier if the wife would do that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex ...about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a reportorial quality in Hemingway's work that is absent from Fitzgerald's fiction. Hemingway's technique--in his early w...ork, at least--was to let the observed detail convey emotion with no authorial analysis. Fitzgerald was more concerned with evoking and analyzing the feeling of an experience than with recording detail. As he advised his daughter, "But when in a freak moment you will want to give the low-down, not the scandal, not the merely reported but the profound essence of what happened at a prom or after it, perhaps that honesty will come to you--and then you will understand how it is possible to make even a forlorn Laplander feel the importance of a trip to Cartier's!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been wr...itten in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film... studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief.... Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol--pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cry cry what shall I cry? The first thing to do is to form the committees:... The consultative councils, the standing committees, select committees and sub-committees. One secretary will do for several committees.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My desire is that your office [the New York Customhouse] shall be conducted on strictly business principles.... In making appointm...ents and removals of subordinates, you should be perfectly independent of mere influence. Neither my recommendation, nor that of the Secretary of the Treasury, nor the recommendation of any Member of Congress, or other influential person, should be specially regarded. Let appointments and removals be made ... by fixed rules.... Let no man be put out merely because he is a friend of the late collector [Chester A. Arthur], and no man be put in merely because he is our friend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »