As the wise philosoper once said....

November 26, 2005 8:52 AM

A good majority of the non-fiction books I read are littered with relevant quips, quotes, and interesting anecdotes. An author may start a chapter with a very succinct quote that beautifully summarizes the theme of the chapter, or during the course of explaining a theory, the writer will include a great historical anecdote to reinforce his opinion. Where does all of this wonderful stuff come from? Are non-fiction authors complete bibliomaniacs armed with photographic memories, or is this stuff added through the editorial process? Is there such a thing as a 'aphorism researcher' or a 'andecdote index'?
posted by jasondigitized to Society & Culture (18 answers total)

I imagine a lot of them come from Bartlett's and similar sources. See for instance, a search on "love."
posted by Tuwa at 9:03 AM on November 26, 2005

well, at least in physics, many of the stories are fairly well known inside the community. they're part of the culture. the institute of physics has published a couple of books called a random walk in science (vols 1 + 2), that collect many together.

in the computing community there are many collections of quotes online. the opinions/comments/witticisms of people like dijkstra, kay, richie et al are well known and pop up regularly in arguments/discussions - many serve a role rather like proverbs do with "common sense".

i would guess other subjects are similar. after all, typical readers of these books aren't from within the particular community (if they were, the book wouldn't be very interesting, really).
posted by andrew cooke at 9:04 AM on November 26, 2005

I think it's more that when you are working on a nonfiction book, you are reading pounds of things related to your topic, so apt quotes and anecdotes are just there in your head or notes. For the essays I've written, the research I've done is orders of magnitude greater than what you would imagine reading the peice. For a book, it is vast.

Also, you have to remember that most nonfiction titles are written by people who are obsessed with their topic: they have to be, both to know what kind of book is missing in that world and to get the contract (publishers want to know why you are the right person to write that book). So beyond the years the author may spend on the title itself, chances are she has decades of familiarity with the subject.

Only a hack or high school kid would use Bartlett's.
posted by dame at 9:11 AM on November 26, 2005

Apparently, though, Susan Sontag just had an incredible memory and voracious bookpetite. In the book Sontag and Kael, he quotes Sontag as saying she never did specific research for any essay. That's a seamless integration of life and work if there ever was one.
posted by dame at 9:14 AM on November 26, 2005

Yeah, dame's got it. Authors read other books -- countless other books -- as a matter of course in doing their research for a particular book or simply becoming experts in their field in general. I've never worked with an author (I'm an editor) who's just picked a quote out of Bartlett's.
posted by scody at 9:27 AM on November 26, 2005

I'm not sure if that's reassuring or intimidating, scody; it's hard for me to imagine having some relevant aphorism at hand and correctly remembered. I guess that's why I'm not a writer. ^_^
posted by Tuwa at 9:57 AM on November 26, 2005

You don't have to have it perfectly remembered, Tuwa. You have to look it up again anyway to check the punctuation, etc. so that the quote it correct. You just have to know where it was or how to find it again.

But generally, when you are working on a book, you are writing it as you research it, and you already know what you want to say about things. (It often changes, but you do have a general idea.) So when you come across something apt, you are ready for it. Does that make sense?
posted by dame at 10:03 AM on November 26, 2005

Taking notes is important too. I know that when I run across something that would make a good epigraph for something (and it needn't be something that I'm working on at the time, just something I could conceivably work on, or know someone who's working on it) I'll jot it down, and put it away in a file somewhere.
posted by .kobayashi. at 10:07 AM on November 26, 2005

Also, most writers take notes of some sort (I certainly do, when I'm researching my own work -- in fact, I usually take so many notes that I get sidetracked from actually writing!), so quotes that jump out as good potential chapter openers/titles/aphorisms/etc. are often jotted down or flagged in some way, even if it's just sticking a post-it note on the relevant page so you can go back and pull it out when you need it.

(on preview: jinx, kobayashi!)
posted by scody at 10:10 AM on November 26, 2005

Also, most writers take notes of some sort

Yes. Writers keep notebooks. They come across a good quote or anecdote, and they write it down. It may get used the next week, it may get used five years down the road, but if you've put it in your notebook, you can access it when you need it.
posted by ludwig_van at 10:39 AM on November 26, 2005

Ask Me: answering questions I didn't know I was wondering about yet.
posted by evariste at 10:41 AM on November 26, 2005

There are people who provide anecdotes. I read somewhere once (should have been taking notes) that Lewis Lapham, whose monthly essays always start off with an apt quote, sometimes employed some amazingly well-read fellow to come up with an appropriate one.
posted by maledictory at 11:15 AM on November 26, 2005

If I learned anything in graduate school, it was to take notes on everything.

My professors were always writing little notes and then cataloging them in some way.

So I would assume that most non-fiction (and many fiction) writers have a huge collection of quotes and things that are easily accessed when looking for a relevent quote or example to throw into the mix.
posted by handshake at 11:45 AM on November 26, 2005

"From the Goethe essay on, quotations are at the center of every work of Benjamin's. This very fact distinguishes his writings from scholarly works of all kinds in which it is the fucntion of quotation to verify and document opinions, wherefore they can safely be relegated to the Notes. This is out of the question for Benjamin. When he was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted of "over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged" (Briefe I, 339); like the later notebooks, this collection was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work, with the writing as something secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another, and were able to prove their raison d'etre in a free-floating state, as it were."

Hannah Arendt, Introduction to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations.
posted by ori at 12:18 PM on November 26, 2005

So I would assume that most non-fiction (and many fiction) writers have a huge collection of quotes and things that are easily accessed when looking for a relevent quote or example to throw into the mix.

It's all about pocket notebooks and index cards.

Taking notes is a way of life.
posted by poweredbybeard at 7:07 PM on November 26, 2005

There was a time when people had to remember things or write them down. The wonders of technology have atrophied those capabilities and habits of mind in many. [/grandpa]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:48 AM on November 27, 2005

Wikiquote is a great source for quotes.
posted by Sharcho at 4:40 AM on November 27, 2005

just to clariy my answer way back. i wasn't trying to point out collections that writers might use, but rather show that what an "uneducated" reader might consider obscure is well known within the subject area. so any writer investigating that area - either through reading texts or talking to practitioners - is going to come across these things without much of a problem.
posted by andrew cooke at 7:16 AM on November 27, 2005