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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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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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The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.
-Andre Maurois
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The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.
-Andre Maurois
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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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You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
-Ian McEwan
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You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
-Larry Mcmurtry
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Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!
-Herman Melville
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
-H. L. Mencken
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Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
-Paul J. Meyer
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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 am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
-James A. Michener
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Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.
-James A. Michener
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What I have crossed out I didn't like. What I haven't crossed out I'm dissatisfied with.
-Cecil B. De Mille
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After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.
-Henry Miller
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A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
-Henry Miller
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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
-Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer (opening)
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Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
-Olin Miller
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Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem.
-John Milton
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I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.
-Moli
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All the world knows me in my book, and may book in me.
-Michel de Montaigne
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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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A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
-Marianne Moore
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Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.
-Edmund Morrison
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Books about Authors & Writing
