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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 characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
-William Hazlitt
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They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
-Lillian Hellman
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If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
-Lillian Hellman
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You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
-Ernest Hemingway
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
-Ernest Hemingway
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I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
-Ernest Hemingway
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They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
-Ernest Hemingway
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A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
-Ernest Hemingway
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We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
-Ernest Hemingway
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The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
-Ernest Hemingway
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The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
-Ernest Hemingway
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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
-Ernest Hemingway
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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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Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
-Oliver Herford
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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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The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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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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You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.
-Horace
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The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.
-Horace
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One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.
-Horace
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Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.
-Horace
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Books about Authors & Writing
