There\u2019s one very popular quote people seem to relish during NaNoWriMo that\u2019s supposedly by William Faulkner: \u201cDon\u2019t be a writer, be writing.\u201d It doesn\u2019t show up on searches of Faulkner websites, but it\u2019s on Pinterest and Wikiquotes, and there are lots of Google images of it. That\u2019s grounds for suspicion as much as the Yoda-like quality of the phrase. I prefer certifiable Faulkner, like the advice he gave in a famous Paris Review interview: \u201cI\u2019ve heard people say,\u2019If I could just stop doing this, I would be a writer.\u2019 I don\u2019t believe that. I think if you\u2019re going to write you\u2019re going to write, and nothing will stop you.\u201d<\/p>\n A veteran of university teaching, Lev Raphael now offers creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/strong>He’s the author of the forthcoming mystery<\/strong> State University of Murder<\/a> and 25 other books in a wide range of genres.<\/strong><\/p>\n *I made that one up. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Internet is awash in bogus quotations and here are three of my favorites. I\u2019ve often seen this quotation from Mark Twain all over Facebook, and the first time was early in the morning, spoiling my first cup of coffee: \u201cSometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[405],"tags":[1545,1544,230,1726,859,1727,406,1725],"class_list":["post-4512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-famous-quotations","tag-author-quotations","tag-author-quotes","tag-bogus-quotations","tag-bogus-quotes","tag-mark-twain","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-quotations","tag-quotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4512"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4524,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512\/revisions\/4524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Mark-Twain-here.png\")
<\/a>While I haven\u2019t read nearly as much Twain as Eliot, I know The Gilded Age well, having read James, Howells, Wharton, and other novelists of that period extensively. I also researched it for a few years to write my own Gilded Age Novel, Rosedale in Love: The House of Mirth Revisited<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/a>Another outrageously obvious misquotation I frequently see online was supposedly uttered by the brilliant Oscar Wilde: \u201cBe yourself. Everyone else is already taken.\u201d Seriously? That sounds like a Nike ad at best. It\u2019s not witty, it\u2019s blunt and ungraceful. But Wilde did write in a letter to Alfred Douglas that \u201cMost people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else\u2019s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.\u201d I wonder what he would have said about people who disseminate fake quotes?<\/p>\n<\/a>If you have a favorite classic author, there\u2019s probably a website devoted to sorting the spurious quotes from the authentic ones for that specific writer. So here\u2019s a thought: Before posting an inspiring author quote on Facebook or elsewhere, or tweeting it, why not verify whether the author actually said it? As Jane Austen put it so well, \u201cThe truth is always at our fingertips, if only we dare reach far enough.\u201d*<\/p>\n