Writers Quotes - Page 3

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.

George Bernard Shaw

Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.

Every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

William Wordsworth

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

Logan Pearsall Smith

When my journal appears many statues must come down.

Duke of Wellington

Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Georges Simenon

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

Rabbi Israel Salanter

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.

Russian proverb

The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take of care themselves.

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.

I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

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.

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.

Ernest Hemingway

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The beginning is easy what happens next is much harder.

Anonymous

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody but one whom nobody can imitate.

Francois Rene De Chateaubriand

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Barbara G. Harris

Begin with another's to end with your own.

Baltasar Gracián

Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way.

Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Henry Kissinger

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

William Stafford

I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.

William Stafford

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

In Ireland a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.

Anonymous

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.

Make'em laugh make 'em cry make 'em wait.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

George Meredith

No tears and the writer no tears and the reader.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James 1st James 2nd and the Old Pretender.

Philip Guedalla

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing to find honest men to publish it and to get sensible men to read it.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

Thought flies and words go on foot.

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

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Nancy Banks-Smith

After writing, there is the letting go part. Perfection is a myth; as we all get better by day.Allow yourself to grow in active practice, release that book to the world, and do better with the next one.

Don't let society's defined genre hold you down, be a free spirit and just write, let society be the one to decide where each piece fits in.

They wouldn't have picked you to tell their story if you weren't the one.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” -

you don't have to be great to get started but you have to to get started to be great

Les Brown

Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.

I close my eyes and think of what might be possible. And, in my mind, I see fireworks over the Hudson.

That moment when a knot forms in your throat, but you choose to throw your head back and laugh instead.

Wear yourself proudly.

Be what you are, all that you are. Wear yourself proudly. It will require that you draw a line, but that line in the sand is your courage.

Airport bars are more like film sets, the bathrooms reminiscent of dormitories. Everyone is waiting to go somewhere, suspended in nowhere...

Today like yesterday and the day before that, I will strive to achieve what tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, I have tried!

Trying to get an agent is like standing in line to be picked for kickball. Pick me! Pick me! ...Dang, last again.

I am so over you, Rejection. You can't get to me like that anymore. I won't let you squash my hopes and dreams. (Slams door) So there!

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