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When I heard the word stream uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
-James Joyce
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No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
-James Joyce
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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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Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.
-Juvenal
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I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
-Jack Kerouac
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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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I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
-Ken Kesey
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The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
-Omar Khayyam
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Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
-Stephen King
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People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
-Stephen King
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I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.
-George Konrad
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
-Milan Kundera
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All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
-Milan Kundera
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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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It requires more than mere genius to be an author.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
-Walter Savage Landor
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I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.
-Fran Lebowitz
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It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
-Jack Lemmon
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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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The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.
-Inigo de Leon
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The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.
-Claude Levi-Strauss
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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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We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
-Cecil Day Lewis
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Books about Authors & Writing
