Uncategorized Quotes - Page 31

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.

Jaron Lanier

Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.

Stephen Jones

It is my personal belief that writing cannot be taught.

Parnell Hall

Do you write every day?' 'Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don't work very hard, really. Really I'm on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.' He'd said all this before, to others; he wondered if he'd said it to her. 'It's like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn't ever a time you absolutely had to do it - there was always Saturday, then Sunday - but then there wasn't ever a time when it wasn't there to do, too.''How awful.' ("Novelty")

John Crowley

It must take a lot of self-discipline,' she said.'Oh, I don't know. I don't have much.' He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that 'Dumas, I think it was Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter - if you write one page a day, you'll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.''I don't know,' she said, laughing. 'I can't even bring myself to write a letter.''Oh, now that's hard.'("Novelty")

John Crowley

Professional writers write to fit

Pamela Glass Kelly

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Dean Wesley Smith

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

Ray Bradbury

Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

Barbara Pym

Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.” (p.136)

Mark David Gerson

Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.

Samuel Johnson

All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

Haniel Long

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

Ursula K Le Guin

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

Dan Brown

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.

Raymond Chandler

You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.

Robert J. Randisi

This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.

Patrick Rothfuss

...she said all writers were prima donnas, drunks, social misfits, pompous, or depressed. Brilliant, maybe, but completely crazy.

Ilsa J Bick

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.

Edward Abbey

He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.

Anne Lamott

He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.

César Aira

I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.

Dean Wesley Smith

So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night.

Stephen King

A kind of losing loadum is their game,Where the worst writer has the greatest fame.

John Wilmot

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.

Roy Blount Jr.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

Graham Greene

An introspective man who doesn’t keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell

Tim Lucas

How become a writer? Naturally.

Edward Abbey

When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant.

Mary Lascelles

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.

William Saroyan

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does

Groucho Marx

The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Writers are nothing more than borderline schizophrenics who are able to control the voices.

Jennifer Salaiz

Lewis Carroll. He was an odd one. Real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Completely denied having anything to do with the Alice books. Daft as a brush. You'd have liked him!

Mike Tucker

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

David Foster Wallace

Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, "Margaret has to die soon." We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sevigne, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk's Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with "It might come in handy," all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won't even talk to us.

Florence King

It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.

Jo Walton

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

Nelson Algren

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

W.H. Auden

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

Lillian Hellman

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.

Helene Hanff

Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.

W Somerset Maugham

Hope is a most beautiful drug.

Jeremy Mercer

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specific

Jaclyn Moriarty

The relationship between a perfect cup of coffee and a writer is just like the couple who always standby and feel proud of being committed to each other.

Himmilicious

Color me....BRILLIANT.

Coco J. Ginger

Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics.

Libba Bray

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying it

Bernard Malamud

Oh, darling, you know we writers must occasionally stretch a point to heighten the dramatic situation.

Patrick Dennis

I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

He'd heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns drinking champagne. This is, of course, absolutely true.

Terry Pratchett

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

William Faulkner

Make foes of bowmen if you must,Never of penmen.

Thiruvalluvar

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.

Italo Calvino

The truth is, we don't have an easy language for emotional life. That's why we have writers.

Susie Orbach

A man who wields a pen has to be accountable to society.

Shūsaku Endō

Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This--the actual pistols--was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.

William Faulkner

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

Simone Weil

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Uncategorized Quotes - Page 31

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