Quotes by Authors - Page 34

In the streets of Cecilia, an illustrious city, I met once a goatherd, driving a tinkling flock along the walls."Man blessed by heaven," he asked me, stopping, "can you tell me the name of the city in which we are?""May the gods accompany you!" I cried. "How can you fail to recognise the illustrious city of Cecilia?""Bear with me," that man answered. "I am a wandering herdsman. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through cities; but we are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all, the Meadow between the Cliffs, the Green Slope, the Shadowed Grass. Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.""I am the opposite of you," I said. "I recognise only cities and cannot distinguish what is outside them. In uninhabited places each stone and each clump of grass mingles, in my eyes, with every stone and clump.
Italo Calvino
This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.
Amit Chaudhuri
As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.
Jardine Libaire
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth and none or almost none for the disenchantments of age.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves For a bright manhood there is no such word As fail.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
What though youth gave love and roses Age still leaves us friends and wine.
Thomas More
It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.
André Gide
The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon or perchance a palace or temple on earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
Henry David Thoreau
Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.
John Jay Chapman
One boy's a boy two boys are half a boy three boys are no boy at all.
Charles A. Lindbergh
In youth we learn in age we understand.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong but it will advance its allotted length.
Helen Keller
The 'teenager' seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
To keep clear of concealment to keep clear of the need of concealment to do nothing that he might not do out on the middle of Boston Common at noonday -I cannot say how more and more that seems to me to be the glory of a young man's life. It is an awful hour when the first necessity of hiding anything comes. The whole life is different thenceforth. When there are questions to be feared and eyes to be avoided and subjects that must not be touched then the bloom of life is gone. Put off that day as long as possible. Put if off forever if you can.
Phillips Brooks
When I was younger I could remember anything whether it had happened or not.
Mark Twain
Oh to be only half as wonderful as my child thought I was when he was small and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am.
Rebecca Richards
This is a youth-oriented society and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover.
Anonymous
When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
Young men think old men fools and old men know young men to be so.
Anonymous
A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.
Thomas Paine
Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler
As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.
Virginia Woolf
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
How can you write if you can't cry?
Ring Lardner
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Laurence Clark Powell
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.
T.S Eliot
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must seem to be inevitable.
Raymond Chandler
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
Hugh MacLennan
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.
Gertrude Stein
A good writer is basically a story-teller not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it. Time changes things God changes things the dictators change things but writers can't change anything.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.
Anaïs Nin
The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
Robertson Davies
The waste basket is a writer's best friend.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
E.M. Forster
Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.
Saul Bellow
Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.
Mordecai Richler
I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
Sholem Asch
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
Saul Bellow
(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Worse
There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths and the lesser ones who can only give you themselves.
Clifton Fadiman
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
Mark Twain
The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.
Ethel Wilson
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
Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.
Jonathan Swift
As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.
Henry David Thoreau
The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.
J.B. Priestley
His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
Ernest Hemingway
Every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the'.
Mary McCarthy
John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx.
Anonymous
I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months but you don't earn the fourth without it.
Mordecai Richler
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Thomas Wolfe
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
Henry David Thoreau
Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.
André Maurois
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau