| A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better
than no inspiration at all. Rita Mae Brown |
| A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is.
To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.
Joseph Joubert |
| Against the disease of writing one must take special
precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease. Abelard |
A great novelist excels
on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well
as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by
selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly. Laura
Miller, Salon.com
|
| All good books are alike in that they are truer than if
they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will
feel
that it all happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the
good
and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the
places
and how the weather was. If you can get so you can give that to people,
then you are a writer. Ernest Hemingway |
| A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a
bad novel tells us the truth about its author. G. K. Chesterton
(1874-1936) |
| A good science fiction story is a story with a human
problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened without its
science content. Theodore Sturgeon |
| A good title is the title of a successful book. Raymond
Chandler |
| All of the books in the world contain no more
information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city
in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. Carl Sagan |
| A man may write at any time, if he will set himself
doggedly to it. Samuel Johnson |
| An author who speaks about his own books is almost as
bad as a mother who talks about her own children. Benjamin Disraeli
(1804-81) |
| An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a
plant can discuss horticulture. Jean Cocteau |
| ...and before I knew what I was doing, I had kicked the
typewriter and threw it around the room and made it beg for mercy. At
this
point the typewriter pleaded for me to dress him in feminine attire but
instead
I pressed his margin release over and over again until the typewriter
lost
consciousness. Presently, I regained consciousness and realized with
shame
what I had done. My shame is gone and now I am looking for a submissive
typewriter,
any color, or model. No electric typewriters please! Rick
Kleiner |
| A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the
importance of things which common sense considers of no great
consequence. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) |
| Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a
novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full
armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. Kurt Vonnegut |
| Anyone who has got a book collection/library and a
garden wants for nothing. Cicero |
| A woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is
to write fiction. Virginia Woolf |
| A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an
answer. Karl Kraus |
| Any sufficiently advanced
technology looks like magic. Arthur
C. Clarke |
| A writer is one for whom writing is more difficult than
it is for other people. Thomas Mann |
| Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a
misprint. Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| Better to write for yourself and have no public, than
to write for the public and have no self. Cyril Connolly
(1903-74) |
| Books are never finished,
they are merely abandoned. Oscar
Wilde |
But who am I to give
lessons? There are no real messages
in my fiction. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a
moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the
hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the
alone for the alone. Donna Tartt
|
| Don't tell me the moon is
shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. Anton Chekhov |
| Easy reading is damned
hard writing. Nathaniel
Hawthorne |
| E. L. Doctorow once said
that "writing a novel is like
driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights but
you can make the whole trip that way." Anne Lamott |
| Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is
great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is
to
be relished. William Wordsworth |
| Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous
vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast. Logan
Pearsall Smith |
| Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an
excellent place for it. Russel Lynes |
| Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to
follow the talent to the dark places where it leads. Erica
Jong |
| Everything has been said,
but not everything has been
said superbly, and even if it had been, everything must be said freshly
over and over again. Paul Horgan |
| Everything has been
thought of before, but the problem
is
to think of it again. Goethe |
| Everything that is written merely to please the author
is worthless. Blaise Pascal (1623-62) |
| Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities
stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of
them. Flannery O'Connor |
| Forget the room of one's own -- write in the kitchen,
lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line,
on the job or during meals, between sleeping or waking. While you wash
the floor or clothes listen to the words chanting in your body. Gloria
Anzaldua |
| From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it
down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it. Groucho
Marx 1890-1977 |
Genre is a useful concept only when used
not evaluatively but descriptively. Ursula LeGuin
|
| Get it down. Take chances.
It may be bad, but it's the
only way you can do anything really good. William Faulkner |
| Get black on white. Guy
deMaupaussant |
Great art is clear
thinking about mixed feelings. W.H.
Auden.
|
| He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will
not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in
the
way between me and the rest like curtains.... What I tell I tell for
precisely what it is.... What I experience or portray shall go from my
composition without
a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the
mirror
with me. Walt Whitman |
| History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. Winston
Churchill (1874-1965) |
How can I believe in God
when just last week I got my
tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? Woody
Allen
|
| How do I know what I think
until I see what I say?
Graham Wallas |
| How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not
stood up to live. Henry David Thoreau |
| Human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out
rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that
will
wring tears from stars. Gustave Flaubert |
| I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then
selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked
good
time. Mark Twain, Letter to the Denver Post |
| I find television very educating. Every time somebody
turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. Groucho
Marx 1890-1977 |
| I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white
paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would
wait,
day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting
dream
of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words
between
me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive
that
it seemed unreal. Richard Wright |
| I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an
echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other
words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for
life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the
inexpressibly human. Richard Wright |
| I felt like poisoning a monk. Umberto Eco on why he
wrote the novel "The Name of the Rose." |
| I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote
a long one instead. Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| I must say, though, that anyone who wants to avoid
reading his [Richard Wagner's] prose has my sympathy. He writes like an
autodidact, with flowery expressions, a vocabulary intended to impress,
unnecessary abstractions and elaborate sentence structures....One forms
the conviction that the prose was improvised, poured out without
forethought or discipline--that when Wagner embarked on each individual
sentence he had no idea how it was going to end. Many passages are
intolerably boring. Some do not mean anything at all. It always calls
for sustained effort from the reader to pick out meaning in the
cloud of words. Often one has to go on reading for several pages before
beginning
to descry, like solid figures in a mist, what it is he is saying. Bryan
Magee, Aspects of Wagner |
| I read the book of Job last night - I don't think God
comes out well in it. Virginia Woolf |
| I don't think anyone should write their autobiography
until after they're dead. Samuel Goldwyn |
| I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot
say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away
and write a book about it. Lord Brabazon |
| I always like it at a war. There is always the chance
that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to
write. Ernest Hemingway |
| I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of
the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters. Solomon
Short |
| If a young writer can refrain from writing, he
shouldn't hesitate to do so. Andre Gide |
I write. I write that I am
writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also
see myself seeing that I am writing. I remember writing and also seeing
myself writing. And I see myself remembering that I see myself writing
and I remember seeing myself remembering that I was writing and I write
seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself write that I saw
myself writing that I was writing and that I was writing that I was
writing that I was writing. I can also imagine myself writing that I
had already written that I would imagine myself writing that I had
written that I was imagining myself writing that I see myself writing
that I am writing. Salvador Elizondo
- The Graphographer
|
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. William Faulkner
|
| If one waits for the right time to come before writing,
the right time never comes. James Russell Lowell |
| If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in
writing. Kingsley Amis |
| If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much
sense to be writers. Irvin S. Cobb |
"If today you can take a thing like evolution
and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can
make it
a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make
it
a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next
session
you may ban books and the newspapers... Ignorance and fanaticism are
ever
busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it
is
the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the
preachers
and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a
while,
Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against
creed
until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to
the
glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to
burn
the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and
culture
to the human mind." Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey
Trial.
The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be
precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the
interior
of Afghanistan. H. L. Mencken |
| If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd
type a little faster. Isaac Asimov (1920-92) |
| It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep
enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. May Sarton |
| It has come to be practically a short rule in
literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original
writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others
at discretion. Ralph Waldo
Emerson |
| It's a nervous work.
The state that you need to be in
to write is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of. Shirley Hazzard |
| It was a book to kill time for those who like it better
dead. Dame Rose Macaulay |
| It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are
reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct
context
-- no human being has been reported to havvvvveee learned dolphinese.
Carl
Sagan |
| It is the writer's business not to accuse and not to
prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned
and suffer punishment. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) |
[John Kenneth Galbraith]
continued to rise early and, despite the seeming effortlessness
of his prose, revised each day's work at least five times. "It was
usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity
for which I am known," he said. from
the NY Times obit, 4/29/06
|
| Just get it down on paper, then we'll see what to do
with it. Maxwell Perkins |
| Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would
make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it. Mark
Twain (1835-1910) |
Language is a form of human reason and has
its reasons which are unknown to man. Claude Levi-Strauss
|
| Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time
unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you. Lynne
Sharon Schwartz |
| Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to
cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece. Nadia
Boulanger |
| Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. G.
K. Chesterton (1874-1936) |
| Looking back, I imagine I
was always writing. Twaddle
it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than
nothing at all. Katherine Mansfield |
| Many people hear voices
when no-one is there. Some of
them are called mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the
walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the
same thing. Meg Chittenden |
| No passion in the world is equal to the passion to
alter someone else's draft. H.G. Wells |
| Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or hatred, is
stronger than a writer's need to change another writer's copy. Arthur
Evan |
|
No
woman was ever ruined by a book. Mayor
Jimmy Walker of New York City.
|
| Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our
conflicts with ourselves we make poetry. William Butler Yeats |
| Of course truth is
stranger than fiction. Fiction,
after all, has to make sense. Mark Twain |
One should respect public
opinion in so far as is
necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything
that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary
tyranny. Bertrand Russell
|
| Originality is the art of concealing your source. Franklin
Jones |
| Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside
of a dog it's too dark to read. Groucho Marx 1890-1977 |
| Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has
never been set up a statue in honor of a critic. Jean Sibelius |
| People do not deserve to have good writing; they are so
pleased with bad. Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| People think I can teach them style! What stuff it is.
Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the
only
secret of style. Matthew Arnold (1822-88) |
| People who like this sort of thing will find this the
sort of thing they like. Abraham Lincoln, in a book review |
| Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so
it can be thought. Audre Lorde |
| Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there
are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Ronald Reagan |
The puritanism of Christianity has played
havoc with the moderation that an enlightened and tolerant critical
spirit
would have produced. I've noticed that in whatever country, county,
town,
or other region there is a regulation enjoining temperance, the
population
seems to be entirely composed of teetotallers and drunkards. There's a
Bible
on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and
antidote. Bertrand Russell, from an interview with Kenneth Harris
|
| Read over your compositions, and when you meet a
passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. Samuel
Johnson |
| Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing
people who can't talk for people who can't read. Frank Zappa |
| Somebody said to me, `But the Beatles were
antimaterialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to
sit down and say `Now, let's write a swimming pool'. Paul
McCartney |
| Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud
voices that you write them just to shut them up. Stephen King |
| 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. Mark Twain |
| Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man
behind the book. Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll
waste no time reading it. Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a book
review |
| The difference between the right word and the almost
right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. Mark
Twain |
The business of the
novelist is not to chronicle great
events, but to make small ones interesting. Arthur
Schopenhauer
|
| The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in
shock-proof shit-detector. Ernest Hemingway |
| The only end of writing is to enable the readers better
to enjoy life or better to endure it. Samuel Johnson |
| The way to write well is to live intensely. Virginia
Woolf |
| The most valuable of all talents is that of never using
two words when one will do. Thomas Jefferson |
| The fight against bad English is not frivolous. George
Orwell |
| The (publishing) business
is a cruel and shallow money
trench. A long
plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like
dogs. There is also a negative side. Hunter
S Thompson |
| The problem with defending
the purity of the English
language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We
don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other
languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their
pockets for new vocabulary. James D. Nicoll |
The only reason people
write is because they are not
wonderful men. Anthony Carson
|
| The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones
run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the
flies. Ray Bradbury |
| The reason why so few good books are written is that so
few people who can write know anything. Walter Bagehot (1826-77) |
| The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage
over the man who can't read them. Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you
are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they
are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time
to time. Donald Trefusis, in Stephen Fry's The Liar |
| The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem
like a solid, stable business. John Steinbeck |
The writer has a grudge
against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex,
unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of distress. Renata Adler
|
| There is only one way to make money at writing, and
that is to marry a publisher's daughter. George Orwell
(1903-1950) |
| There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written or badly written. Oscar Wilde |
| There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to
be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a
cutlet. But he should do that. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) |
| There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those
who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul
and
body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes. Karl
Kraus |
| There are only three rules for writing a novel.
Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. Somerset Maugham
(1874-1965) |
There
has
been much posted here of late, and a good measure of heated debate,
between
the Enlightened and the Ignorant. The Ignorant insist that their
inability
and sloth should be forgiven as simple human failures, and that
the
Enlightened's insistance on correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling
is
somehow a blight on the character of the remaining few who have the
courage
and skill to hold the flag high though the cause be sinking in a
swamp
of mediocrity and effluvium.
I find the stance of the
Ignorant to be repugnant, not only intellectually, but morally.
I despise the attitude that I
must forgive the failings of those who are so lazy that they can not
learn the basic spelling and use of their native language. It is
disgusting that anyone has ever defended the crass flatulus of
these people as legitimate expression.
To write decently is not a task of insurpassable difficulty, it
requires
only that most human of all traits -- desire. If you desire to be
understood,
you must communicate. If you desire to convince, you must
communicate
expressively, eloquently, and with full command of the English
language.
Even in these days of television (and other stupidities), to
communicate
with people in positions of power and responsibility you must write and
speak
well. Here on the 'net, you are ONLY what you write. Scott M.
Hampton
|
| There are only two or three human stories, and they go
on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened
before. Willa Cather |
| This book fills a much-needed gap. Moses Hadas
(1900-1966) in a book review |
| This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It
should be thrown with great force. Dorothy Parker |
| Those who write clearly have readers, those who write
obscurely have commentators. Albert Camus (1913-60) |
| Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought
to write. Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) |
| Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents,
and everyone is writing a book. Cicero |
Tis very difficult to
write like a madman, but 'tis a
very easie matter to write like a fool. Nathaniel Lee
|
| Unless one is a genius, it
is best to aim at being
intelligible. Anthony Hope Hawkins |
| Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. Jonathan
Swift |
| We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he
selects as by what he originates. Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| What I have in mind when I
start to write could fit
inside an
acorn--an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write
fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end
up with a mackerel....Philip Roth |
| What is written without
effort is read without
pleasure. Samuel Johnson |
| What progress we are
making. In the Middle Ages they
would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. Sigmund
Freud |
| When a man is in doubt about this or that in his
writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a
hundred years hence. Samuel Butler (1835-1902) |
| When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you
write in rhyme you say what you must. Oliver Wendell Holmes |
| When you write, don't say, "I'm going to write a poem."
That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least
expectation of yourself; say, "I am free to write the worst junk in the
world." Natalie Goldberg |
| When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know,
and I do not very much care, how it is to end. Anthony Trollope
(1815-1882) |
| When I want to read a novel, I write one. Benjamin
Disraeli (1804-81) |
| When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple.
Take it and copy it. Anatole France
When one tugs at a single string in nature, he finds it
attached to the rest of the world. John Muir
|
With each book you write
you should lose the admirers
you gained with the previous one. Andre Gide
|
| Words are all we have.
Samuel Beckett |
| Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes
away or you die. Joe Haldeman |
Writing a novel is a
terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the
teeth decay. Flannery O'Connor
|
Writing a short story is a little like
walking
into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the
end
of the story. Dan Chaon
|
| Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and
grinders. Walter Bagehot (1826-77) |
Writing is more than
anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a
day for fear of awful consequences. Julie
Burchill
|
| Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is
not a way of life: It is a comprehensive response to life. Gregory
McDonald |
| 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 the mirror which waits always before or behind. Catherine
Drinker Bowen |
| Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank
sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. Gene
Fowler |
Writing is really horribly
hard and I mistrust writers why say it's fun. Writing is a lot of fun
-- after you've done it. Beginning it is ppaiinful and you always think
you've forgotten how. Roger Angell
|
Writinig is not a
profession, but a vocation of unhappiness. Georges Simenon
|
| Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they
occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring
which
is difficult. Stephen Leacock |
| Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Martin Mull |
| Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I
think mine is), is but a different name for conversation. Laurence
Sterne |
| Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade
just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If
not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Truman
Capote |
| Writing is a dog's life,
but the only life worth
living. Gustav Flaubert |
| Writing is like
prostitution. First you do it for the
love of it, then you do it for a few friends, then you do it for money.
Moliere |
| Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like
a long bout of some painful illness. George Orwell (1903-1950) |
| You can't want to be a writer, you have to be one. Paul
Theroux |
You must stay drunk on writing so reality
cannot destroy you. Ray Bradbury
|
|
You write from what you know, but you write in what you
don't know. Grace Paley
|
| You need not expect to get your book right the first
time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his
thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command
attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too
much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. Mark
Twain, Letter to Orion Clemens, 3/23/1878 |
