Quotes by Authors - Page 35

Write something even if it's just a suicide note.
Anonymous
It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win hold or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.
John Mason Brown
There is but one art to omit.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Self-expression is for babies and seals where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader.
Vincent McHugh
Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons he would lose his angels.
Dakin Williams
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words a paragraph no unnecessary sentences for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline but that every word tell.
William Strunk
Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man write about a man.
E B White
When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.
Brian Moore
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
Virginia Woolf
In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Edith Wharton
Get black on white.
Guy de Maupassant
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself- it is the occurring which is difficult.
Stephen Leacock
The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.
Theodore Isaac Rubin
I quote others in order to better express my own self.
Michel de Montaigne
I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
That's not writing that's typing.
Truman Capote
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
Washington Irving
For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.
Rumer Godden
I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.
Henry Miller
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The beginning is easy what happens next is much harder.
Anonymous
Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.
Ernest Hemingway
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names identities personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
Mel Brooks
I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.
A.J. Liebling
There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.
Saul Bellow
Take care of the sense and the sounds will take of care themselves.
Lewis Carroll
The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.
Saul Bellow
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J.P. Donleavy
Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Albert Camus
Thought flies and words go on foot.
Julien Green
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
W.H. Auden
In Ireland a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.
Anonymous
I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I know) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.
Rudyard Kipling
I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.
Michel de Montaigne
When you can't remember why you're hurt that's when you're healed. When you have to work real hard to re-create the pain and you can't quite get there that's when you're better.
Jane Fonda
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump you may be freeing him from being a camel.
G.K. Chesterton
Although the world is full of suffering it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
Until you've lost your reputation you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
Margaret Mitchell
Our way is not soft grass it's a mountain path with lots of rocks. But it goes upwards forward toward the sun.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer
To say that my grief will be eternal would be ridiculous - nothing is eternal.
Marie Bashkirtseff
Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires - disruptions in our lives that seem to be disasters at the time but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.
Bernie S. Siegel
Other Definitions of Adversity Adversity is the touchstone of virtue.
Anonymous
When written in Chinese the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
John F Kennedy
To every disadvantage there is a corresponding advantage.
W Clement Stone
What the student calls a tragedy the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach
A broken heart is what makes life so wonderful five years later when you see the guy in an elevator and he is fat and smoking a cigar and saying "long-time-no-see." If he hadn't broken your heart you couldn't have that glorious feeling of relief!
Phyllis Battelle
I have lived long enough to be battered by the realities of life and not too long to be downed by them.
John Mason Brown
Sleep riches and health to be truly enjoyed must be interrupted.
Jean Paul Fichter
No man better knows what good is than he who has endured evil.
Anonymous
Misfortunes tell us what fortune is.
Thomas Fuller
If you want the rainbow you gotta put up with the rain.
Dolly Parton
If you want to see the sun shine you have to weather the storm.
Frank Lane
The harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly 'tis dearness only that gives everything its value.
Thomas Paine
What worries you masters you.
Haddon W. Robinson