Quotes on writing

Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel

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What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
Rascoe, Burton

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No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Adams, Henry

 chakras  language  writing  

  

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.
Lawrence, D.H.

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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.
Ellis, Havelock

 quotations  writing  

  

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.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.
Acton, Harold

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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.
Styron, William

 writing  

  

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.
Christie, Agatha

 housework  writing  

  

Be obscure clearly.
White, E. B.

 writing  poetry  

  

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.
Adams, Franklin

 writing  

  

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.
Plath, Sylvia

 writing  

  

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.
Thomas, Dylan

 writing  

  

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.
Rilke, Rainer Maria

 chakras  writing  

  

Writing is both mask and unveiling.
White, E. B.

 writing  

  

Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
Eliot, T.S.

 writing  

  

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
Nin, Anaïs

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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Arendt, Hannah

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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.
Faulkner, William

 writing  

  

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.
Alcott, Amos Bronson

 writing  

  

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith

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It's not plagiarism - I'm recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do.
Swain, Uniek

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Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Kafka, Franz

 writing  

  

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.
Lover, Samuel

 literature  writing  

  

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.
Kazin, Alfred

 writing  

  

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.
Woodhull-Bäche, Emme

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I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
Michener, James

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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.
Crane, Hart

 writing  

  

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.
Hemingway, Ernest

 writing  vulgar  

  

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.
O'Connor, Flannery

 writing