Neverisms

Canfield’s Up and Down and Around: A Publisher Recollects the Time of His Life, the longtime president and chairman of Harper & Brothers appears to have misremembered the Shaw remark, presenting it this way: “Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.”

Never persist in trying to set people right.HANNAH WHITALL SMITH, in a 1902 letter to a friend

This is the concluding line to one of my all-time favorite quotations. It begins: “The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not.” Smith, a lay follower of John Wesley, became a suffragist and temperance activist. She was the mother of the writer Logan Pearsall Smith.

Take as many half-minutes as you can get,

but never talk more than half a minute without pausing

and giving others an opportunity to strike in.JONATHAN SWIFT, attributed by Sydney Smith

The earliest reference to this popular quotation was in an 1870 book, The Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. Sydney Smith. Smith, a prominent English writer and cleric, was well known for his wit. The book describes the saying as “His favourite maxim (copied from Swift).” So far, though, I have been unable to find this observation in Swift’s complete works.

Never use damaging information to invalidate your adversary.JOSEPH TELUSHKIN, in The Book of Jewish Values:

A Day-by-Day Guide to Ethical Living (2000)

Rabbi Telushkin added: “This rule is simple, but breaking it is what so often transforms moderate arguments into furious quarrels, the kind that lead to permanent ruptures between friends or family members.”

Never refuse any advance of friendship,

for if nine out of ten bring you nothing, one alone may repay you.CLAUDINE GUERIN DE TENCIN

In the early 1700s, Madame de Tencin maintained a Paris salon whose guests included such famous men as Baron de Montesquieu and Lord Chesterfield. For most women of the era, career options were severely limited, leading some of the most enterprising to form salons as a way to advance their social standing.

Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor;

he will always use it in evidence against you.HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE

This was reported in a 1956 biography of Tree by Hesketh Pearson. The older brother of the famed English caricaturist Max Beerbohm, Tree was an English actor and theater manager who went on to found the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1904. He may have been familiar with a similar warning advanced two centuries earlier by the esteemed French writer and aphorist Jean de La Bruyere:

Never risk a joke, even the least offensive and the most common,

with a person who is not well-bred, and possessed of sense to comprehend it.

Never rise to speak till you have something to say;

and when you have said it, cease.JOHN WITHERSPOON

Witherspoon was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who was persuaded in 1768 to come to America to serve as president of the struggling College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton University. As a Scotsman, he was often suspicious of the English crown, and he quickly became sympathetic with the grievances of the colonists. He was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Never suspect people.

It’s better to be deceived or mistaken, which is only human,

after all, than to be suspicious, which is common.STARK YOUNG, quoting his father

nine

Never Approach a Woman from Behind

Sex, Love & Romance

In August of 2004, celebrity ghostwriter Neil Strauss was thrilled to learn that his most recent literary project—Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale—had opened at number three on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was his third bestselling “celebrity bio” in six years. At age thirty-five, Strauss was already being described as one of the most successful ghostwriters in publishing history.

After graduating from a private high school in the Chicago suburbs in the late 1980s, Strauss headed east with dreams of becoming a writer. While a student at Vassar College and Columbia University, he honed his skills by writing scores of articles for newspapers and magazines. After college, he landed a job at the Village Voice, where he performed whatever menial tasks needed doing—fact-checking, proofreading, writing ad copy—in order to occasionally write a piece that carried his byline.

Though months would go by without one of his stories being published, Strauss didn’t get discouraged. His persistence paid off when several of his pieces were noticed by honchos at the New York Times. Strauss soon began writing pieces on music and pop culture for the Times, and shortly after that for Rolling Stone. It was a heady time for the aspiring writer. Still in his twenties, he was developing a national reputation—and garnering a few industry awards along the way—for his profiles of such cultural icons as Madonna, Tom Cruise, Kurt Cobain, and Marilyn Manson.

Shortly after the Marilyn Manson profile appeared in Rolling Stone, Strauss received a call from Manson’s agent, asking him if he would consider ghostwriting a book for the rock star. Strauss eagerly accepted, and over the next several months developed a whole new approach to writing celebrity autobiographies. Instead of spending hundreds of hours poring over tape-recorded interviews, Strauss immersed himself in Manson’s life: living in his L.A. mansion, traveling with him on tour, partying with the musicians and their groupies, and in general becoming a fly on the wall of the performer’s life. He said of his method:I need more than just a voice on tape. I really need to be around that person all the time so I can see what their life is like. And if I’m ghostwriting, I need to be able to write how they would write if they could write.

Strauss’s around-the-clock presence in Marilyn Manson’s life, combined with his ability to gain the rock star’s trust, resulted in The Long Road Out of Hell, a 1998 celebrity autobiography that directly paralleled another famous journey through hell: Dante’s Inferno. The book, which revealed dark and disturbing elements of Manson’s past as well as softer and more vulnerable sides of his personality, was critically acclaimed, and Strauss was soon being hailed for breaking new ground in the genre (a Rolling Stone review said, “There has never been anything like it”). The Manson book marked Strauss’s first appearance on the New York Times bestseller list, and was soon followed by three more bestselling celebrity ghostwriting projects: The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s