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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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-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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Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.
-Joseph Addison
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The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
-Renata Adler
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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 hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
-Nelson Algren
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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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Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
-Martin Amis
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It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
-Margaret Anderson
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To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.
-Aristotle
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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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If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
-Isaac Asimov
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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
-James Atlas
essay: The Fall of Fun, "The New Yorker", November, 1996
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
-W. H. Auden
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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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Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. And what are you reading, Miss -- -? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
-Jane Austen
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I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.
-Jane Austen
The narrator, in Northanger Abbey, ch. 5, 1818
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A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
-Richard Bach
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A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
-Walter Bagehot
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
-James Baldwin
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Books about Authors & Writing
