Quotes on writing
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
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Burton Rascoe Quotes
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
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Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
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Henry Adams Quotes
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
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James Michener Quotes
Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.
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Etty Hillesum Quotes
I am a man, and alive... For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.
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D.H. Lawrence Quotes
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
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Vladimir Nabakov Quotes
The best style is the style you don't notice.
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Somerset Maugham Quotes
It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.
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Havelock Ellis Quotes
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.
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Graycie Harmon Quotes
The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.
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Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
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Don Marquis Quotes
Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
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Jules Renard Quotes
So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.
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Harold Acton Quotes
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
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William Styron Quotes
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.
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George Gordon Byron Quotes
The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
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Mark Twain Quotes
Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves.
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C. Astrid Weber Quotes
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
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Elias Canetti Quotes
The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.
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Agatha Christie Quotes
Be obscure clearly.
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E. B. White Quotes
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
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Ray Bradbury Quotes
Writers are just people who have a whole lot on the inside that they need to get to the outside, with pen and paper as their preferred method of transport. Same with dancers, artists, and singers - all the same urges with differing transportation.
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Graycie Harmon Quotes
Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.
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Franklin Adams Quotes
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
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Sylvia Plath Quotes
Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals.
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Proust Quotes
Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
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Dylan Thomas Quotes
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
Writing is both mask and unveiling.
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E. B. White Quotes
Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
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T.S. Eliot Quotes
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
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Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
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Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.
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Ann Beattie Quotes
Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
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Gene Fowler Quotes
No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.
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Russell Lynes Quotes
The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.
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C. Astrid Weber Quotes
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
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Henry David Thoreau Quotes
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
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Anaïs Nin Quotes
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
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Catherine Drinker Bowen Quotes
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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Hannah Arendt Quotes
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton Quotes
The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
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William Faulkner Quotes
Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.
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Amos Bronson Alcott Quotes
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
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Orson Scott Card Quotes
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton Quotes
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
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Adlai E. Stevenson Quotes
It's not plagiarism - I'm recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.
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Uniek Swain Quotes
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
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George Orwell Quotes
Let's hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks.
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Peter S. Prescott Quotes
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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E.L. Doctorow Quotes
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
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Franz Kafka Quotes
There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.
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William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.
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Samuel Lover Quotes
An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.
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Juvenal Quotes
I even shower with my pen, in case any ideas drip out of the waterhead.
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Graycie Harmon Quotes
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.
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James Norman Hall Quotes
Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.
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Walter Savage Landor Quotes
He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
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John Ray Quotes
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
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Alfred Kazin Quotes
Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.
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Emme Woodhull-Bäche Quotes
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
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James Michener Quotes
One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen.
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Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
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Sholem Asch Quotes
No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
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Van Wyck Brooks Quotes
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
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George Gordon Byron Quotes
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.
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Hart Crane Quotes
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
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Samuel McChord Crothers Quotes
Writing is a struggle against silence.
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Carlos Fuentes Quotes
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
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André Gide Quotes
Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
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Ernest Hemingway Quotes
Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.
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Samuel Johnson Quotes
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
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Flannery O'Connor Quotes
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
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Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith Quotes
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
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Mark Twain Quotes
Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you.
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Mae West Quotes
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
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Virginia Woolf Quotes