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"Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written."
-Anon.
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"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research."
-Anon.
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It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order.
But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home; to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own culture. If the writer is unwilling to fill this part, then the writer should abandon pretense and find another line of work: become a shoe repairman, a brain surgeon, a janitor, a cowboy, a nuclear physicist, a bus driver.
-Edward Abbey, "Writer's Credo"
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“If I am ever liberated from this bondage of racialism, there are some things much more exciting to me, objectively, to write about.…But this world has such a social orientation, and I am involved in this world and I can’t cut myself off."
-Peter Henry Abrahams
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The circumstance which gives authors an advantage above all these great masters, is this, that they can multiply their originals; or rather, can make copies of their works, to what number they please, which shall be as valuable as the originals themselves.
-Joseph Addison, "in the "Spectator", no. 166"
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Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
-Brian W. Aldiss
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The original story, whatever it was, was told to those who forgot some details and substituted others. The original is long lost in the "restorations."
They have had the composer accompanied by a gifted sister, who, the inflexible record shows, died years before the song was written. They have seated him at the prim old spindle-legged mahogany desk in the hall at Federal Hill and had him "dash it off" in the frenzy of inspiration. Or they have followed him to the rocks of the old "spring house," whither they have sent him, pencil in hand, and counted the frowns of agony with which he laboriously set down now a strain of melody and again a phrase of words. They have heard him "trying it out" with the "deep booming bass voice" of him who had never more than a weak but sweet light baritone. Every writer of it has himself for the hero and has described it as he would himself have acted it before the grand audience of posterity. These various stories cling about Federal Hill, the outgrowth of the human desire for contact with the vague figures of the past.
-Young Ewing Allison, [writing about Stephen Foster's song 'My Old Kentucky Home']
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"People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."
-Matthew Arnold
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Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.
-Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951
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If you don’t have a six-figure deal by the time you’re thirty-five, you’ve failed. In fact, why even be a writer?
-James Atlas, essay: The Fall of Fun, "The New Yorker", November, 1996
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No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
-W. H. Auden
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"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly."
-Julian Barnes
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Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing — or even walking about. It is a sound instinct in men to feel this distrust and contempt for writing; and as for writing about writing, why it is writing squared; it is writing to the second power, in which the original evil is concentrated... There is even, I am told, a third degree of horror. Writing about what other people have written about writing: “Lives of the Critics,” “Good English,” “Essays on Sainte Beuve” — things of that sort. Good Lord deliver us.
-Hilaire Belloc
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When I am dead, I hope it is said,
'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read'.
-Hilaire Belloc
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It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I coudn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
-Robert Benchley
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"Let me tell you what a writer is. A writer takes comprehensive views, holds large convictions, makes wide generalizations. A writer's not English, Mexican, or American. A writer's not a woman nor a man. A writer's not Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, nor snake worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong a writer's civilly indifferent. In the virtues, a writer's concerned only with general expediency. A writer doesn't waste time focusing on fixed moral principles that aren't yet before the court of conscience. Happiness discloses itself to a writer as the end and purpose of life, and art and love are the only means to a writer's happiness. A writer is free of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, and politics. To a writer, a continent doesn't seem long, nor a century wide. And a writer has ever present consciousness that this is a world of...fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions, and frothing mad."
-Ambrose Bierce
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"[I]t is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing."
-Jorge Luis Borges, cited in "A biographical study of a poet of Buenos Aires" by Evaristo Carriego, 1930
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A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
-Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing (p. xv)
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I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.
-Ray Bradbury
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My stories run up and bite me in the leg -- I respond by writing them down - everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
-Ray Bradbury
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Richard Bach with this book does two things. He gives me
Flight. He makes me Young. For both I am deeply grateful.
-Ray Bradbury
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Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.
-Jimmy Breslin, ""Times" (London)", May 9, 1990
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In sissy times, like these, one — a writer, especially — can afford to be brutal, lean, mean, etc. In fact, in sissy times one practically has to peddle gore and garbage, for otherwise one won’t sell.
-Joseph Brodsky
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Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
-Joseph Brodsky
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"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him."
-Mel Brooks
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"I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know."
-Mel Brooks
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If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.
-Joyce Brothers, On KNBR radio station (San Francisco), November 13, 1990
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"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it."
-James Bryce
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Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.
-Pearl Buck
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Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu, Act II, sc. 2, 1839
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Readers of the twenty-first chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but my aesthetic judgement may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics. 'Quod scripsi scripsi' said Pontius Pilate when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. 'What I have written I have Written.' We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the judgement of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
-Anthony Burgess, November, 1986
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I look better, feel better, make love better and I'll tell you something else....I never lied better.
-George Burns
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Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.'
-William S. Burroughs
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In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas. . . a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
-William S. Burroughs, Remark, 1964. Quoted in: Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1977).
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To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
-Truman Capote
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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
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The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Interview, June 1, 1960
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Man hardly comes in more than two varieties, wherever he is, whatever he does: workers and pimps ... they're either one or the other! ... and inventors, the worst kind of jobholder! ... they stand condemned! ... the writer who doesn't pimp along, peacefully plagiarizing, who doesn't pump out the pop stuff, he's had it! ... everybody hates him!
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine
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Another piece of advice: when you proofread cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out. It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously. And then one other thing; you are lyrical by nature. The timber of your soul is soft. If you were a composer you would avoid writing marches. It is unnatural for your talent to curse, shout, taunt, denounce with rage. Therefore, you'll understand if I advise you, in proofreading, to eliminate the "sons of bitches," "curs," and "flea-bitten mutts" that appear here and there on the pages of Life.
-Anton Chekhov, To Maxim Gorky, September 3, 1899
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"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
-G. K. Chesterton
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"I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse."
-Agatha Christie
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Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
-Tom Clancy
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"If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers."
-Irvin S. Cobb
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Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
-Colette
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To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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"Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease."
-Charles Caleb Colton
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I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug.
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise
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Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
-Cyril Connolly
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The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value (with a rôle for Ingrid Bergman), may yet somehow win the coveted jackpot, is feverish and incessant. Last year's authors (most of the names that have just reached England) are pushed aside and this year's—the novelist Jean Stafford, her poet husband Robert Lowell, or the dark horse, Truman Capote—are invariably mentioned. They may be quite unread, but their names, like a new issue on the market, are constantly on the lips of those in the know. "Get Capote"—at this minute the words are resounding on many a sixtieth floor, and "get him" of course means make him and break him, smother him with laurels and then vent on him the obscure hatred inherent in the notion of another's superiority.
-Cyril Connolly, Blueprint for a Silver Age: Notes On a Visit to America, "Harper's Magazine", December, 1947
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"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once."
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938
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We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.
-Robert Cormier, answering the question "What advice do you give to young people who want to be authors?"
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"In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is."
-Geoffrey Cottrell
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"The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way."
-Richard Harding Davis
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"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
Copyrighted material by Peter De Vries and estate: this quotation is not for sale.
-Peter De Vries
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When writing about transcendental issues, be transcendentally clear.
-Rene Descartes
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"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."
-Philip K. Dick
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"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."
-Philip K. Dick, Exegesis [Philip K. Dick's journal], 1981
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An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0300/dubus/interview.html
-Andre Dubus, III, [from an interview by Larry Weissman]
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I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. I rarely feel it with a whole piece, but sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.
-Andre Dubus, III
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In this new book, I open with a Hebrew quotation nobody is able to understand. This is in order to say, "O.K., do you want to play this game? You are my friend, and we go. Otherwise, too bad for me or for you." I think it is untrue that my books are impenetrable. On the contrary, I think I am a sort of great vulgarizer. I put down certain difficult stuff, but I give my readers clues to understand what this kind of stuff is.
-Umberto Eco, [Interview: regarding Foucault's Pendulum]
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A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "New York Post", September 22, 1963
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Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Representative Men," "Goethe", 1850
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"There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one."
-James T. Farrell
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A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
-William Faulkner
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I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html
-William Faulkner, speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950
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An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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The author should be in his work like God is in the universe--present everywhere and visible nowhere.
"L'auteur dans son oeuvre doit etre comme Dieu dans l'univers, present partout et visible nulle part."
-Gustave Flaubert
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It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew he could hear me. Praised may he be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.
-Gustave Flaubert
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"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."
-Gene Fowler
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A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.
-Anatole France
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Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
-André Gide
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Before I explain my book to others, I expect them to explain it to me. To claim to explain it first is to immediately narrow down its reach; for if we know what we intended to say, we do not know whether we said only that. - One always says more than THAT. - And what interests me most is what I put in without knowing, - that unconscious share, which I would like to call God's share.
-André Gide, Paludes [Marshlands]
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All these books have lived together [...] inside my mind. They follow one another only on paper and because of an utter impossibility to let themselves be all written at the same time. Whatever book I write, I never devote myself to it completely, and the matter which most insistently requires me soon later develops, however, at the other end of me.
-André Gide, Journal, September-October 1909
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"Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason."
-André Gide
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“Too often I wait for the sentence to finish taking shape in my mind before setting it down. It is better to seize it by the end that first offers itself, head or foot, though not knowing the rest, then pull: the rest will follow along.”
-André Gide
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A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
-Johann von Goethe
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Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
-William Golding, "Rough Magic" [Lecture], February 16, 1977
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The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning.
-Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, ch. 2 (1986; tr. 1990)
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"It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter . . . This wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency . . . to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there . . . These perceptions came too late . . . I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all."
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
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So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
-William Hazlitt
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The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
-Ernest Hemingway, quoted in A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, 1966 edition, pt. 1, ch. 4 (1966)
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"The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me, and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy."
-Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Emily Dickinson's Letters", "Atlantic Monthly", [comment regarding the poetry of Emily Dickinson], October, 1891
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"The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop."
-Alfred Hitchcock
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Men are idolaters and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it out of wood, you must make it out of words.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872
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On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.
-A.E. Housman
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The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.
-Julia Ward Howe
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I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.
-Langston Hughes
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
-John Irving, Interview in Writers at Work (Eighth Series, ed. by George Plimpton, 1988).
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There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it?
-Henry James, essay "The Art of Fiction" published in Longman's Magazine
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"...There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning... When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?... It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character. If you say you don't see it (character in that–allons donc!) this is exactly what the artist who has reasons of his own for thinking he does see it undertakes to show you. When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faith enough, after all, to enter the Church, as he intended, that is an incident, though you may not hurry to the end of the chapter to see whether perhaps he doesn't change once more. I do not say that these are extraordinary or startling incidents. I do not pretend to estimate the degree of interest proceeding from them, for this will depend upon the skill of the painter. . . . the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting."
-Henry James, "The Art of Fiction", 1884
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The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
-Samuel Johnson
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Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
-Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets
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Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
-James Joyce
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It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
-Jack Kerouac
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It isn't easy, it does take an incredible amount of discipline, you don't just write just when you feel like it or you're not going to build up much of a body of work. Inspiration comes to you while you're writing rather than before....For me the discipline of writing and the discipline of prayer are identical, in that I have to let myself be got out of the way because that's not a do-it-yourself activity, and listen....When you write, don't think, write. You think before, you think after, you don't think during. When I'm praying, when I'm truly praying, I'm not thinking, I'm not speaking, I'm shutting up, so perhaps if God has something to say I can hear it. So writing too is an act of listening, listening to what has to be said.
-Madeleine L'Engle, Perkins Lecture Series, Wichita Falls, 1996
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"Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications."
-Fran Lebowitz
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Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep. It's always in the middle of the night, or you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them...
-John Lennon
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"We turn first ter the bleedin' parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare collocated by Guvnor Cruickshank ter make manifest Massinger's indebtedness. I'll get out me spoons. One of the surest of tests is the way
in wich a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets nick; bad poets deface wot they take, and right good poets make it into sumfink better, or at least sumfink different. The bloody right good poet welds 'is theft into a 'oole of feelin' wich is unique, right, utterly different from that from wich it were torn; the bad poet frows it into sumfink wich 'as no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from auffors remote in time, or alien in 'am sandwich, right, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The bleedin' two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from 'im; 'e is too close ter ffem ter be of use ter ffem in this way. Massinger, as Guvnor Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a right good deal."
[note: this is the original spelling as Lewis wrote it. Also: see a quote attributed to T.S. Eliot]
-C.S. Lewis, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1922
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"Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it."
-J. Russel Lynes
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"Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst."
-Ford Maddox
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"The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst."
-Thomas Mann, From the Introduction to Herman Hesse's "Demian", 1919
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The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can't fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.
-Groucho Marx
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There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
-W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938
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Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
-W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook
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It is quiet here and restful and the air is delicious. There are gardens everywhere and police spies lie in the bushes. There are nightingales in every garden, but police spies only in mine, I think. They sit under my windows in the darkness of the night and try to get a glimpse of how I spread sedition in Russia.
-Gorky Maxim, Letter to Anton Chekhov
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I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
-James A. Michener
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I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, and defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off-key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (opening)
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"Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come."
-Charles Montesquieu
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"For five months I got up at six o'clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my "stunt" for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school. When people say to me, as they occasionally do, 'Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do', I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship."
-Lucy Maud Montgomery
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There's more of yourself in a book than a play. that's why we know all about Dickens and not much about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky—who is doomed to accept it over and over again through an infinity of textbooks, with a question mark for monument.
-Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense [foreword]
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
-Pablo Neruda
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I have used these weeks to "revalue values." Do you understand this expression? When you come right down to it, the alchemist is the most praiseworthy of men: I mean the one who changes something negligible or contemptible into something of value, even gold. He alone enriches, the others merely exchange. My task is quite singular this time: I have asked myself what mankind has always hated, feared, and despised the most—and precisely out of this I have made my "gold" ...
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to Georg Brandes, May 23, 1888
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A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
-George Orwell, "Horizon", April, 1947
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I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. […] One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.
-George Orwell, "Why I Write"
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Mr Wells […]belongs to the non military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swash-buckling side of life, symbolized in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses.
-George Orwell, essay "Wells, Hitler And The World State"
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“If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.”
-Dorothy Parker
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"I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that."
-Walker Percy, Interview, 1989
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"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing."
-Enrique Jardiel Poncela
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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
-Ezra Pound
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It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.
-Ezra Pound
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"I don't believe in it. All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?"
http://www.philip-pullman.com/about_the_writing.asp
-Philip Pullman, answering "What do you do about writer's block?"
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"I got to the point where the vampire began describing his brother's death, and the whole thing just exploded! Suddenly, in the guise of Louis, a fantasy figure, I was able to touch the reality that was mine. It had something to do with growing up in New Orleans, this strange, decadent city full of antebellum houses. It had something to do with my old-guard Catholic background. It had something to do with the tragic loss of my daughter and with the death of my mother when I was fourteen. Through Louis' eyes, everything became accessible. But I didn't ask when I was writing what it meant; I only asked if it felt authentic. There was an intensity--an intensity that's still there when I write about those characters. As long as it is there, I will go on with them. In some way they are a perfect metaphor for me."
-Anne Rice, (regarding writing Interview With The Vampire), "Publishers Weekly"
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Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
-John Ruskin
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Remember to never split an infinitive.
The passive voice should never be used.
Do not put statements in the negative form.
Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
A writer must not shift your point of view.
And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
Always pick on the correct idiom.
The adverb always follows the verb.
Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
-William Safire, "William Safire's Rules for Writers"
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A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.
-Jean-Paul Sartre, [Upon refusing the Nobel Prize], October 22, 1964
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"I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato."
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.
-Delmore Schwartz
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I wrote a poem to the moon
But no one noticed it;
Although I hoped that late or soon
Someone would praise a bit
Its purity and grace forlone,
Its beauty tulip-cool...
But as my poem died still-born,
I felt a fool.
I wrote a verse of vulgar trend
Spiced with an oath or two;
I tacked a snapper at the end
And called it Dan McGrew.
I spouted it to bar-room boys,
Full fifty years away;
Yet still with rude and ribald noise
It lives today.
'Tis bitter truth, but there you are-
That's how a name is made;
Write of a rose, a lark, a star,
You'll never make the grade.
But write of gutter and of grime,
Of pimp and prostitute,
The multitude will read your rhyme,
And pay to boot.
So what's the use to burn and bleed
And strive for beauty's sake?
No one your poetry will read,
Your heart will only break.
But set your song in vulgar pitch,
If rhyme you will not rue,
And make your heroine a bitch...
Like Lady Lou.
-Robert William Service, My Cross
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Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
-Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
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"But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows...
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me; ‘look in thy heart and write.’"
-Sir Philip Sidney
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"What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers."
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day.
-Mickey Spillane
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Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.
-Mickey Spillane
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I'm a commercial writer, not an "author." Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
-Mickey Spillane
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Can an author with reason complain that he is cramped and shackled if he is not at liberty to publish blasphemy, bawdry, or sedition?; all of which are equally prohibited in the freest governments, if they are wise and well-regulated ones.
-Philip Dormer Stanhope, Letter to his Son, Philip Stanhope, February 7, 1749
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To finish is a sadness to a writer - a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
-John Steinbeck
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"The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so."
-Wallace Stevens, Adagia
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I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.
-Harriet Beecher Stowe, [on writing Uncle Tom's Cabin]
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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.
-William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958
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"I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time."
-William Styron
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I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
-William Styron
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Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what [a] friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles and little nuisances of one sort or another.
-William Styron, Quoted in James L W West III, ed., Conversations with William Styron, University Press of Mississippi, 85.
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"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write."
-William Makepeace Thackeray
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Work was impossible. The geeks had broken my spirit. They had done too many things wrong. It was never like this for Mencken. He lived like a Prussian gambler -- sweating worse than Bryant on some nights and drunker than Judas on others. It was all a dehumanized nightmare...and these raddled cretins have the gall to complain about my deadlines.
-Hunter S. Thompson, Bad Nerves in Fat City
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Gonzo journalism is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism...
-Hunter S. Thompson, "The Great Shark Hunt" [Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1979]
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I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence.
-Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The Doomed - More Notes On The Death Of The American Dream (page 296)
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One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool.
-Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The Doomed - More Notes On The Death Of The American Dream (page 109)
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National Observer became my road gig out of San Francisco. I was too much for them. I would wander in on off hours drunk and obviously on drugs, asking for my messages. Essentially, they were working for me. They liked me, ,but I was the Bull in the China Shop --- The more I wrote about politics the more they realized who they had on their hands. they knew I wouldn't change and neither would they.
-Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The Doomed - More Notes On The Death Of The American Dream (page 106)
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Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.
-J. R. R. Tolkien
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Write out of love, write out of instinct, write out of reason. But always for money.
-Louis Untermeyer
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
-John Updike, Quoted in "Writers at Work" (George Plimpton, ed.), 1976
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My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most writers I wanted to make a practical go of it. And my career was eminently practical. I fastened on to this magazine, the New Yorker, that seemed to me to be the top of its class and I tried to get into it, and I did get into it. It was kind of calculating. Kind of crass.
But I framed it to myself as a kind of altruistic ambition. Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought weren't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else. To entertain people, or to hold out a standard of beauty or to even inform them seemed so self-evidently out of what my father called the rat race. Dog eat dog, in his phrase. He had a despairing picture of the capitalist world, as losers in that system tend to do.
-John Updike
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I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.
-John Updike, (on being an "old writer")
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Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, and Tennessee Williams has about five, and Samuel Beckett one - and maybe a clone of that one. I have ten or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
-Gore Vidal
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The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said: ‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’
-Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought, 1926
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Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame, if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.
-John Wesley
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One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love.
-Jessamyn West, To See the Dream, part 3, 1956
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From reincarnated sources and through prenatal causes I was born with unquenchable hope and unfaltering faith in God and guardian spirits. I often wept myself to sleep after a day of disappointments and worries but woke in the morning singing aloud with the joy of life.
I always expected wonderful things to happen to me.
In some of my hardest days when everything went wrong with everybody at home and all my manuscripts came back for six weeks at a time without one acceptance, I recall looking out of my little north window upon the lonely road bordered with lonelier Lombardy poplars, and thinking, ‘Before night something beautiful will happen to change everything.’ There was so much I wanted.
…Once I read a sentence which became a life motto to me. ‘If you haven’t what you like, try to like what you have.’ I bless the author for that phrase it was such a help to me.
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox, reflecting on her hardships and her drive to overcome them
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“At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.”
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
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Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated—thrown aside—a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.
-William Carlos Williams, Journal entry, July 7, 1929
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"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
-Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love (from chapter 'Personal Power')
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Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing.
-Colin Wilson
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There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it’s why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
-Tobias Wolff
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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
-Virginia Woolf
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All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books about Authors & Writing
