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A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
-Cyril Connolly
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The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
-Cyril Connolly
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When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.
-Cyril Connolly
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.
-Cyril Connolly
Enemies of Promise, 1938
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I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all humbug.
-Cyril Connolly
Enemies of Promise
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Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
-Cyril Connolly
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The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value (with a r
-Cyril Connolly
Blueprint for a Silver Age: Notes On a Visit to America, "Harper's Magazine", December, 1947
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What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?
-Joseph Conrad
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I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one -- one for all men and for all occupations.
-Joseph Conrad
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In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.
-Robert Coover
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Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.
-James J. Corbett
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We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.
-Robert Cormier, answering the question What advice do you give to young people who want to be authors?
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When in doubt, delete it.
-Philip Cosby
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In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
-Geoffrey Cottrell
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If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
-Quentin Crisp
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There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.
-Aleister Crowley
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Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
-Edward Dahlberg
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To write is a humiliation.
-Edward Dahlberg
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What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
-Edward Dahlberg
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I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.
-Robertson Davies
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The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
-Richard Harding Davis
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If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
-Don Delillo
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Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging.
-Patrick Dennis
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Books about Authors & Writing
