Set of quotes expressing same bitter truth: Big words come and go cheaply and easily.
William Yeats 1,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Bertrand Russell 1
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
interview with Charles Bukowski 1
— Your poem ‘friendly advice to a lot of young men” says that one is better off living in a barrel than he is writing poetry. Would you give this same advice today?
— I guess what I meant is that you are better off doing nothing than doing something badly. But the problem is that bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt. So the bad writers tend to go on and on writing crap and giving as many readings as possible to sparse audiences. These sparse audiences consist mostly of other bad writers waiting their turn to go on, to get up there and let it out in the next hour, the next week, the next month, the next sometime.