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As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
-A. J. Liebling
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No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
-Mario Vargas Llosa
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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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If they have a popular thought they have to go into a darkened room and lie down until it passes.
-Kelvin Mackenzie
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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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I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
-Norman Mailer
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
-Norman Mailer
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The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
-Paul De Man
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The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
-Paul De Man
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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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Would you not like to try all sorts of lives -- one is so very small -- but that is the satisfaction of writing -- one can impersonate so many people.
-Katherine Mansfield
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Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
-Don Marquis
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If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
-Judith Martin
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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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Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
-Groucho Marx
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The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
-Karl Marx
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For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Books about Authors & Writing
