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In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my de sk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
Pearl S. Buck
The best way to become more creative is to create nothing. Ilchi Lee
An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.
Juvenal
Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don t validate. Indulge what you don t like. Wallow in it. Write t he opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the gr ain!
Deena Metzger
If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of id eas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts an d philosophies.
Allan W. Eckert
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Hunter Thompson
Life stand still here. Virginia Woolf
The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.
Confucius
If there s a book you really want to read, but it hasn t been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
Half of being smart is knowing what you re dumb at. David Gerrold
And your very flesh shall be a great poem. Walt Whitman
I never quite know when I m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a par ty and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle o f a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he s ick?
No, my wife says, he s writing something. James Thurber
I love being a writer. What I can t stand is the paperwork. Peter De Vries
Thinking is common to all. Heraclitus
If you start to edit as you write, you are climbing into your editor self, the sel f that reads. You ve done plenty of reading, you don t need practise right now. Just write.
Sandra Jensen
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. Oscar Wilde
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Let any clergyman try to preach the T ruth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his ch urch on his own bannister.
Herman Melville
When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what his thoughts a re at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible , in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts o r sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with th e expression.
Edgar Allan Poe
Put weather in. Joseph Hansen
A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark. Dante Alighieri
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his gu ts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
Charles Peguy
A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Sidney Smith
Reading and weeping opens the door to one s heart, but writing and weeping opens t he window to one s soul.
M. K. Simmons
An artist needn t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a w arm heart for his fellow men.
Vincent Van Gogh
Van Wyck Brooks
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and fa miliar things new.
Samuel Johnson
The best style is the style you don t notice. Somerset Maugham
There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He know s where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through ag ain.
H. P. Lovecraft
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the tru th about its author.
G.K. Chesterton
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great f orce.
Dorothy Parker
If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
Vincent Van Gogh
Life itself is a quotation. Jorge Luis Borges
Pay attention to the sound of words. Dave Wolverton
Too often we opt for the decorative or the superficial, avoiding the beauty that Keats associated with truth the terrible beauty, the terrifying beauty that str ips us naked by its presence.
Deena Metzger
There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can t get a good story out of it.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten.
Meister Eckhart
Writing is a dog s life, but the only life worth living. Gustave Flaubert
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detecto r. This is the writer s radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway
I started with all the handicaps, incapabilities, and helplessness. I didn t talk when I was twenty. I taught myself by the act of writing.
Anaïs Nin
A man s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book. Ernest Hemingway
Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to w hat you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant you just don t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you d mapped out for your self. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon. Roger Zelazny
Whenever they start talking foreign, observed John Harris, forecastleman, starboar d watch, you know they are at a stand, and that all is, as you might say, in a ma tter of speaking, up.
Patrick O Brian
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I cou ldn t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert C. Benchley
I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversi ve, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.
Anthony Trollope
There s no money in poetry, but then there s no poetry in money either. Robert Graves
Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. T. S. Eliot
I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things tha t lie buried deep in my heart.
Anne Frank
We are all of us failures, at least, the best of us are. James M. Barrie
I follow the scent of falling rain and head for the place where it is darkest. I follow the lightning and draw near to the place where it strikes.
There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are .
Somerset Maugham
If I don t write to empty my mind, I go mad. Lord Byron
That terrible mood of depression of whether it s any good or not is what is known as The Artist s Reward.
Hemingway
You can t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. Jack London
Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph .
William Butler Yeats
Most people won t realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprentic eship in it like anything else.
Katherine Ann Porter
First thought, best thought. Allen Ginsberg
I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sl eep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those word s, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Third thought, best thought. Frank Conroy
The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up: this it is which knows how to extract the seed out of the body, and which fo rms the Stone of the philosophers by the conjunction of the spirit with the body of sulphur with mercury. Hermes has manifestly demonstrated the operation of th is First Key by these words: In the caverns of the metals there is hidden the St one, which is venerable, bright in colour, of mind sublime, and an open sea, the Sea of the Wise, in which they angle for their mysterious Fish. But the operati ons have a great deal of analogy one to another, to the end that those who have not the Lynx s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost. Take heed, therefore, not to be deceived here; for it is a truth, that in each work the Wise Artist ought to di ssolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven s head, whiten the Blac k, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven. Hence, Hermes sa ys: What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art. Consider that it is b y separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that ou r astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins th e blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at th is shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.
The Six Keys of Eudoxus
You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
James M. Barrie
Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it. Stanislaw Lem
To look a fool is the secret of a wise man. Edgar Allen Poe
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balanc e.
James Joyce
Easy reading is damn hard writing. Nathaniel Hawthorne
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose. Stephen King
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to k eep.
Scott Adams
There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.
P. L. Travers
The hard part is getting to the top of page one. Tom Stoppard
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. Raymond Chandler
It s not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of th e window.
Wallace Stevens
I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.
Aleister Crowley
The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and th en spoiling it.
Diane Johnson
Resolve and thou art free. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me .
When people ask me how I know so much about mankind, they get a simple answer: e verything I know about men, I learned from me.
Anton Chekhov
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is am azed at one s luck.
Iris Murdoch
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the moder n novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
Writing is fighting. Muhammad Ali
It is perfectly okay to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly. C. J. Cherryh
The effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.
P. G. Wodehouse
An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a per son, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
Mark Twain
Enter into the object, the whole of its delicate life, feeling as it feels. Shinkichi Takahashi
The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants. Rumi
I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open li ttle by little into the full light.
Sir Isaac Newton
He thought and suffered a good deal, but lacked the resolution to dare, the firs t requsite of a practicioner.
Lawrence Durrell
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you ve got it made. Jean Giraudoux
Beauty is not caused. It is. Emily Dickinson
We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh .
Friedrich Nietzsche
I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O . Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned o ver the next few years, I began to sell.
Louis L Amour
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and v isible nowhere.
Gustave Flaubert
All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. Alice Walker
This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in. Charles Dickens
What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of acti on.
Meister Eckhart
Sometimes you have to go on when you don t feel like it, and sometimes you re doing good work when it feels like all you re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitti ng position.
Stephen King
How to write a poem? Rip your chest wide open and pour out whatever is crowded t here.
Pirjo Zeylon
To write must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, h as to float to the surface of its own impulse.
Henry Miller
At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you kn ow what you want.
Lao Tzu
Chris Offut
Why don t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum. P. G. Wodehouse
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end but not necessarily in tha t order.
Jean Luc Godard
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. Lord Byron
God protects those he loves from worthless reading. J.K. Lavater
Good writing is true writing. Hemingway
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don t feel I should be doing somet hing else.
Gloria Steinem
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. Ray Bradbury
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foo t upon his neck.
William James
I d like to have money. And I d like to be a good writer. These two can come togethe r, and I hope they will, but if that s too adorable, I d rather have money.
Dorothy Parker
Writing is turning one s worst moments into money. J. P. Donleavy
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat s mat is a sto ry.
John le Carre
I guess I don t so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old. Benjamin Franklin
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slip pery and thought is viscous.
Henry Brooks Adams
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree wh ich does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Write what comes up. Barbara Turner-Vesselago
You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd. Flannery O Connor
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but on e who allows art to realize its supreme purpose through him.
Carl Jung
Most writers need to write. I write for money, really. If I won the lottery, I w ould never write another word. I would rather read.
Clarissa Dickson Wright
You must not come lightly to the blank page. Stephen King
I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then we nt back and filled in the spaces.
Harold Ross
Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are on e.
Heraclitus
Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.
J. Krishnamurti
I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit. P. G. Wodehouse
If you desire faith, then you have faith enough. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A poet never speaks directly, as to someone at the breakfast table. William Butler Yeats
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. Doris Lessing
There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a story teller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three storyteller, teacher, enchanter but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
Vladimir Nabokov
Outside of a dog, a man s best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it s too dark to r ead.
Groucho Marx
There is no need to imagine before you paint. Painting brings forth imagination. Kazuaki Tanahashi
In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are im portant, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
Geoffrey Cotterell
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel s heart beat, and we should die of that r oar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot
I do not write for such dull elves as have not a deal of ingenuity themselves. Jane Austen
Read poetry: it s quite hard. Don Paterson
Write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writ ing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.
Gertrude Stein
The inner life strengthens the outer life, and vice versa. And it is stories tha t can unite these two precious worlds one mundane, the other mythic.
Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. Lawrence Kasdan
Nature is the art of God. Dante Alighieri
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I m one of the world s great rewriters .
James A. Michener
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrot e.
Mignon McLaughlin
One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar. Helen Keller
Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already. Marcus Aurelius
In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other word you have wri tten; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
Sydney Smith
Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truth.
Henry Miller
Dream making emerges from a fundamental desire for intimacy, the love of creatio n, and the necessity to speak.
I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is no t directed to him, does not have to open and read.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Everywhere I go I m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don t stifle enough of them. There s many a bestseller that could have be en prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O Connor
Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, con sider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. It p roduces great praise to a lady to spell well.
Thomas Jefferson to his daughter
Lighting does occasionally strike and occasionally the result isn t a corpse. Tillie Olsen
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
Kahlil Gibran
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the differenc e between lightning and a lightning bug.
Mark Twain
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observanc e, that you o erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o erdone is from th e purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image , and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
William Shakespeare
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human em otions.
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Carl Jung
Make a list of everything you must not write about. Deena Metzger
The road to ignorance is paved with good editors. George Bernard Shaw
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
G.K. Chesterton
It s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you we re born that way.
Ernest Hemingway
Intolerance is evidence of impotence. Aleister Crowley
It s not plagiarism I m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious write r would do.
Uniek Swain
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard. Daphne Du Maurier
A work of art has an author, and yet, when perfect, it has something which is es sentially anonymous about it.
You thunder and lightning too much the reader ceases to get under the bed by and by.
Mark Twain
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest ac tivity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writ er of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
Somerset Maugham
A metaphor is like a simile. Unknown
Life s enchanted cup sparkles near the brim. Lord Byron
I turn sentences around. That s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it aro und. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I com e back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.
Philip Roth
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick. William James
I try to leave out the parts that people skip. Elmore Leonard
An artist cannot do anything slovenly. Jane Austen
Ice-cream is exquisite what a pity it isn t illegal. Voltaire
I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either e ntirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering. Oscar Wilde
I firmly believe every book was meant to be written. Marchette Chute
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
Nothing is made worse or better by praise. Marcus Aurelius
Writer s block is simply a failure of ego. Norman Mailer
Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphys ical one; it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rathe r than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lo wer worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself. Henry Miller
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn t brood. I d type a li ttle faster.
Isaac Asimov
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no su rprise in the reader.
Robert Frost
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
Camille Paglia
I am a galley slave to pen and ink. Honore de Balzac
Thou art God, and I am God and all that groks is God. Robert Heinlein
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conce al it as well as she can.
Jane Austen
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. Benjamin Franklin
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. William Wordsworth
When you are describing, A shape or sound or tint;
Don t state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint. Lewis Carroll
Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems. Philip Larkin
I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.
H.G. Wells
Frederich Nietzsche
I never dare to write as funny as I can. Oliver Wendell Holmes
If the sex scene doesn t make you want to do it whatever it is they re doing it hasn t been written right.
Sloan Wilson
Poetry: the best words in the best order. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and the n your story and then your story!
Ford Madox Ford
Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person s reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn t think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, I knew girls who saved his gum.
Amy Hempel
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert Heinlein
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he d have somebody to look up to. Gene Fowler
Stephen Wright
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. Douglas Adams
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. Truman Capote
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.
Hart Crane
Writers are just people who have a whole lot on the inside that they need to get to the outside, with pen and paper as their preferred method of transport. Same with dancers, artists, and singers all the same urges with differing transporta tion.
Graycie Harmon
Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves arou nd a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.
Katherine Anne Porter
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more diffic ult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Benjamin Franklin
Why do writers write? Because it isn t there. Thomas Berger
It s not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic. Eric A. Burns
To accuse others for one s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accu se oneself shows that one s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor oth ers shows that one s education is complete.
Epictetus
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things. Franz Kafka
Substitute damn every time you re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imita te.
Francois-Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand
Adults are just obsolete children. Dr Seuss
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Ezra Pound
People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
Herbert Spencer
People on the outside think there s something magical about writing, that you go u p in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, a nd that s all there is to it.
Harlan Ellison
Bravery never goes out of fashion. William Makepeace Thackeray
I ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only revie wer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I wo uld die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
Anton Chekhov
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, As those move easiest who have learn d to dance. Alexander Pope
Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. Graycie Harmon
Good things, when short, are twice as good. Gracián
Art is the proper task of life. Friedrich Nietzsche
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance. Ray Bradbury
The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that it s not about me. It s about the cong regation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do
. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says, I loved how you said , and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I neve
r said.
Great things are done when men and mountains meet. William Blake
Don t use words too big for the subject. Don t say infinitely when you mean very ; otherw ise you ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite
.
C. S. Lewis
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. Logan Pearsall Smith
I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it sho uld have.
Leonardo da Vinci
Poetry gave me back my voice. Maya Angelou
Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and ar e shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writ ers and they do pretty much the same thing.
Meg Chittenden
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes .
Erasmus
Wake the happy words. Theodore Roethke
No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperamen t, except to think him overdoing everything.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. Albert Camus
I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of mu sical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.
P. G. Wodehouse
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody s head. John Updike
Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement. Jackson Pollock
Every writer I know has trouble writing. Joseph Heller
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize. Henry James
There s no such thing as writer s block. That was invented by people in California w ho couldn t write.
Terry Pratchett
Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest. The tree o f knowledge is not the tree of life.
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Vladimir Nabakov
Writers have lives, too. Doug Kurtz
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it s about, but the inner musi c the words make.
Truman Capote
Be obscure clearly. E.B. White
If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is God is c rying. And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is Probabl y because of something you did.
Jack Handy
Writing well means never having to say, I guess you had to be there. Jef Mallett
The end of a novel, like the end of a children s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.
Anthony Trollope
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it. A novel s whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening w hat is already written. That is finding the theme.
Diane Johnson
William Safire
Don t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. Anton Chekhov
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
Ray Bradbury
Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
Lewis Carroll
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. T. S. Eliot
Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
P. G. Wodehouse
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can ma ke such a thing really scare or ring true. That s because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible.
H. P. Lovecraft
If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me. William Shakespeare
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wanted to make a million doll ars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
L. Ron Hubbard
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. Henry David Thoreau
Never throw up on an editor. Ellen Datlow
A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
W. Somerset Maugham
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Ever y time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
E.L. Doctorow
Imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniat ure psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know.
Jane Roberts
Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
Sharon O Brien
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle .
John Cheever
A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone s feelings unintentionally. Oscar Wilde
I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.
Benjamin Franklin
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. Muriel Rukeyser
Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream? Homer Simpson
No ideas but in things. William Carlos Williams
Writing is its own reward. Henry Miller
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Ronald Reagan
It s hard enough to write a good drama, it s much harder to write a good comedy, and it s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
Jack Lemmon
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. Orson Scott Card
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intel ligence; he is just using his memory.
Leonardo da Vinci
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
Writing is a struggle against silence. Carlos Fuentes
The best time for planning a book is while you re doing the dishes. Agatha Christie
We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishin g things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.
Paracelsus
After being turned down by numerous publishers, he had decided to write for Post erity.
George Ade
There is nothing fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass...unless you are an sf writer, in which case pretty soon you are viewing crab grass with suspici on. What are it s real motives? And who sent it here in the first place? It only l ooks like crab grass. That s what they want us to think it is. One day the crab gr ass suit will fall off and their true identity will be revealed. By then the Pen tagon will be full of crab grass and it ll be too late. The crab grass, or what we took to be crab grass, will dictate terms.
Phillip K. Dick
The story is not in the plot but in the telling. Ursula K. LeGuin
The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance cannot in the opinion of His Majesty s G overnment be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.
Winston Churchill
Novelists: fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helples sly through the chaos of his own existence.
A writer s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world. Zadie Smith
Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man s. William Blake
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. John Lennon
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
Walt Whitman
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. Karl Kraus
I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it short er.
Blaise Pascal
Don t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you ll hav e to ram them down people s throats.
Howard Aiken
Getting ahead in a difficult profession singing, acting, writing, whatever requi res avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against stagger ing blows and unfair reversals.
Sophia Loren
Be curious, not judgmental. Walt Whitman
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering and it s all over much too soon. Woody Allen
You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better. Maxim Gorky
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a co mma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
Of course the game is rigged. Don t let that stop you if you don t play, you can t win .
Robert Heinlein
I ve always said fantasy is sort of stealth philosophy . Terry Goodkind
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The read er, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Ursula K. LeGuin
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addresse d envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner
There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn t be. He is too many people if he s any good.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications. Fran Lebowitz
Writing well is the best revenge. Dorothy Parker
What I am saying, I suppose, is that you write as if everyone is dead. Then you face the music. I don t know any other way to keep the teeth sharp and the spirit alive.
Lynn Freed
I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
Steve Martin
To anyone capable of suspending for a moment the cavortings of the rational mind , of accepting myth for what it is not lie but the very veritable truth it needs no great inward effort to act upon such advice. It s a matter, merely, of listeni ng.
P. L. Travers
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. Jane Austen
Only great minds can afford a simple style. Stendhal
Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those on e has had.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditoriu m of his skull.
Rod Serling
Tell the truth, but tell it slant. Emily Dickinson
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is anoth er kind of music.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Let us read and let us dance two amusements that will never do any harm to the w orld.
Voltaire
From the first words of a fairy story, we relax not because we are entertained b ut because we are in the presence of truthfulness.
Deena Metzger
Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words. Jonathan Swift
I ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you di d, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself. Charles Dickens
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fi re.
Reggie Leach
I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
Michel de Montaigne
Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
Anne McCaffrey
I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothi ng about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertaining ly.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. Z. N. Hurston
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. Oscar Wilde
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers. H.L. Mencken
Writing is the flip side of sex it s good only when it s over. Hunter S. Thompson
I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to s ay in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.
Lord Brabazon
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Sir Francis Bacon
Less than an hour before, he had congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.
Clifford D. Simak
Samuel Goldwyn
An artist is his own fault. John O Hara
Somebody is a good dreamer. Pirjo Zeylon
Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it s damn good for you.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer fo r her, or turn her into literature.
Lawrence Durrell
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own langu age cannot be understood and appreciated.
Thomas Bulfinch
Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards. Lewis Carroll
On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind t o put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.
Terry Brooks
Words are the physicians of a mind diseased. Aeschylus
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Words so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how po tent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
They lard their lean books with the fat of others works. Robert Burton
A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author s soul.
Aldous Huxley
Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happine ss in life without having to go to books for it.
Dorothy Parker
Nature also forges man, now a gold man, now a silver man, now a fig man, now a b ean man.
Paracelsus
No one does anything from a single motive. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I my self deny it.
H. L. Mencken
The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense. Tom Clancy
He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license. Milton Berle
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won t be able to take a brea k from being a writer.
Stephen Leigh
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder a nd bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, and the Renaiss ance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of dem ocracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles
Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.
Christian Dior
I m very proud of my flops, as much as of my successes. Francis Ford Coppola
A witty saying proves nothing. Voltaire
What is a hero without love for mankind? Doris Lessing
You taught me language and my profit on t is I know how to curse. William Shakespeare
Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he ll eventually ma ke some kind of career for himself as writer.
Ray Bradbury
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different i mmediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And y
et it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one ma n seems nonsense to another.
Hermann Hesse
Why, sometimes I ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Lewis Carroll
All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart. Carlos Castaneda
He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon th e imagination and the heart.
Washington Irving
Write what you like; there is no other rule. O. Henry
A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and fro m the reader the writer learns.
P. L. Travers
Anybody can make an easy deal, but only a true agent can sell a dog. Irving Swifty Lazar
A man s errors are his portals of discovery. James Joyce
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must tra in himself in ruthless intolerance that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why i t is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don t think the tale nt makes much difference, whether you ve got it or not.
William Faulkner
Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death o f air, and earth in the death of water.
Heraclitus
A word is dead When it is said, Some say.
I say it just begins to live that day. Emily Dickinson
If it has horses and swords in it, it s a fantasy, unless it also has a rocketship in it, in which case it becomes science fiction. The only thing that ll turn a st ory with a rocketship in it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.
Debra Doyle
Keep a diary and one day it ll keep you. Mae West
Loafing is the most productive part of a writer s life. James Norman Hall
The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page. Joan Baez
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone s neurosis, and we d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunc h of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron
The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.
He is able who thinks he is able. Buddha
It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a se ed that will flower and come to fruition.
Isaac Asimov
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. Socrates
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting. Gore Vidal
The adjective is the enemy of the noun. Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Anybody can have ideas the difficulty is to express them without squandering a q uire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. Mark Twain
How do I know what I think, until I see what I say? E. M. Forster
It is odd how the law always harps upon the unnaturalness of sodomy, observed Step hen. Though I know at least two judges who are paederasts; and of course barriste rs.
Patrick O Brian
You have to talk to the stone, and it has to talk to you. Ben Nighthorse Campbell
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. Mark Twain
I feel happy to terrify kids. R. L. Stine
The question isn t who is going to let me; it s who is going to stop me. Ayn Rand
Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of it s own accord.
Nikolai Gogol
I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.
Anne Frank
Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. Nikos Kazantzakis
He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears. Michel de Montaigne
Next to excellence is the appreciation of it. William Makepeace Thackeray
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window an d kiss the night air.
Franz Kafka
Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before. Joseph Campbell
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Ernest Hemingway
Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then you have to ask them to leave.
Marc Lawrence
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write no t outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else by the s ame name.
Aldous Huxley
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Ch aos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your des ire to make art. Tolerance for uncertainty is a prerequisite for succeeding. David Byles and Ted Orland
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
Writing is a product of silence. Carrie Latet
Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, i ntroduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Goin g into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end that is what you must be abl e to attain.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55. Mark Twain
There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common : a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Kurt Vonnegut
If you wait for inspiration, you re not a writer, but a waiter. Louis L Amour
Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. Nikos Kazantzakis
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire aroun d it.
I don t have to have faith, I have experience. Joseph Campbell
To go against sense, to go against reason, to deliberately deconstruct the world of grammar and thoughtful orderliness is, in effect, to destroy the world as we know it and allow something new to emerge. Grammar is, above all, a system of t hought and perception, the way the world is defined and primary relationships ar e perceived.
Deena Metzger
Big words are always punished. Sophocles
Beware thoughts that come in the night. William Least Heat-Moon
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn t matter. I m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn t make us better, then what on earth i s it for?
Alice Walker
Observe, don t imitate. John M. Ford
I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting mere tricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal f oreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously a cquired.
Patrick O Brian
The proper use of imagination can propel ideas in the direction you desire. Jane Roberts
Being scared can keep a man from getting killed, and often makes a better fighte r of him.
Louis L Amour
I desired dragons with a profound desire. J.R.R. Tolkien
In the aftermath of the crisis, tulip mania gave way to tulip-phobia. The profes sor of botany at Leyden, Evrard Forstius, was said to be so incensed by the flow er that he could not see a tulip without attacking it viciously with his stick. Edward Chancellor
Should I lose my demons, wherefore my angels? Nathanial Hawthorne
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
William Butler Yeats
Fear is excitement without the breath. Robert Heller
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. Aristotle
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The harde st way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a g reat thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
Pablo Neruda
I still can t decide which is more fun reading or writing. Rex Stout
Homer Simpson
From a technical point of view there are two essential things to solve or create when writing a novel. The first is the invention of the narrator. I think the n arrator is the most important character in a novel. In some cases this importanc e is obvious because the narrator is also a central figure, a central character in the novel. In other cases, the narrator is not a character, not a visible fig ure, but an invisible person whose creation is even more complicated and difficu lt than the creation of one of the characters.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by rea son.
André Gide
Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye. William Gibson
A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. John le Carre
You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.
Frederik Pohl
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
Ursula K. LeGuin
If you liked being a teenager, there s something really wrong with you. Stephen King
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
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
Virginia Woolf
A man who is a genius and doesn t know it, probably isn t. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Every artist joins a conversation that s been going on for generations, even mille nnia, before he or she joins the scene.
John Barth
Be anything you want to be, but don t be dull. Frank Robinson
It is not down in any map; true places never are. Herman Melville
Only self-educated is educated. Others are merely taught. Erno Paasilinna
No tricks. Raymond Carver
To write is, above all else, to construct a self. Deena Metzger
There is in each of us an ongoing story. It contains our meaning and our destiny . And it goes on inevitably whether we pay attention to it or not.
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
Henry David Thoreau
The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his o wn deeds.
Harold Hayes
A writer s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.
Ethel Wilson
Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man s life, must place him in such a s ituation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.
Leo Tolstoy
Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called up on to sit down and write.
Fran Lebowitz
My task is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel. It is, before all, to make you see. That and no more and it is everything. Joseph Conrad
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco , food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. Winston Churchill
I may as well tell you that if you are going about the place thinking things pre tty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!
P. G. Wodehouse
The pen is the tongue of the mind. Miguel de Cervantes
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end. Philip Larkin
Following the creative is a path, but it is not a known path. Deena Metzger
When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky. Before you cut down a m ahogany you should ask permission of the keeper of the forest, and you should as k permission of the keeper of the star.
Chan K in
To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder. Louis L Amour
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. Joseph Campbell
I have no mouth, and I must scream. Harlan Ellison
When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; yo u see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman
Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition. Terry Josephson
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you thin k is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
I don t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.
Woody Allen
Read, read, read. Read everything trash, classics, good and bad, and see how the y do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master . Read! You ll absorb it. Then write.
William Faulkner
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. Anne Lamott
The reality is more excellent than the report. Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn t matter a damn how you write.
Somerset Maugham
The Sibyl with raving mouth utters solemn, unadorned, unlovely words, but she re aches out over a thousand years with her voice because the god is in her.
Heraclitus
In a thousand words I can have the Lord s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln s Gettysb urg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?
Roy H. Williams
Jane Roberts
We forget that what matters begins with the imagination. Terry Brooks
Every activity of the creative process requires that we bring spirit into form, that we create a vessel ourselves or a work of art that can hold the spirit. Deena Metzger
Via clear nature of mind and methods of words, the glows of meanings and direct perceptions: with these four kinds of excellent awareness all things are manifes t in views compassionate.
Prajna Paramita
In art economy is always beauty. Henry James
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger. Rainer Maria Rilke
I like to write when I feel spiteful: it s like having a good sneeze. D.H. Lawrence
The easiest thing to do on earth is not write. William Goldman
Speak, that I may see thee. Ben Jonson
This writing business. Pencils and whatnot. Overrated, if you ask me. Winnie the Pooh
A blank piece of paper is God s way of telling us how hard it to be God. Sidney Sheldon
Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh .
Ecclesiastes
Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you re a writ er. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff s worth, without pity, and de stroy most of it.
Colette
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. Joseph Conrad
The only time to believe any kind of rating is when it shows you at the top. Bob Hope
He who limps is still walking. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that want s help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it. Dr Samuel Johnson
A book is like a man clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. Fo r every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
Talent is a long patience. Gustave Flaubert
He who Works with his Hands, is a Laborer.
He who Works with his Hands and his Head is a Craftsman.
He who Works with his Hands, his Head, and his Heart is an Artist. Seneca
The archetypal situation and the mythic realm hover around the perimeters of sto ry.
Deena Metzger
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword. Robert Burton
Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it. Garrison Keillor
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
First, find out what your hero wants. Then just follow him. Ray Bradbury
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it. Ayn Rand
I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk. Hortense Calisher
Mystery is the basic element of all works of art. Luis Buñuel
Words are a lens to focus one s mind. Ayn Rand
It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence .
Erasmus
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett
One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one s pen.
Leo Tolstoy
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interr upted each night, it is one single notation.
Elias Canetti
My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of c ommitting suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meets with a murderer. Nathaniel Hawthorne
I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer t hing Life is! So unlike anything else, don t you know, if you see what I mean. P. G. Wodehouse
Writers speak stench. Franz Kafka
ain solid in the places that scare us. Laraine Herring
What I would say to a young person trying to become a writer is Don t. It won t make any difference because they ll do it anyway, but they really shouldn t.
Robert Burton
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Walter Bagehot
When the sun hit that bonnet just right, I could swear I saw angels in her hair. Billy-Bob Hornwinkle
The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on tha t thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The clothes make the man. Naked people contribute little or nothing to society. Mark Twain
It s just my smart ass gorglings. Pirjo Zeylon
Editing is Human, free-writing Divine! Milli Thornton
I am so clever that sometimes I don t understand a single word of what I am saying .
Oscar Wilde
M. Scott Peck
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can t blunt the edge of wit or the point of sa tire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediatel y clear.
James Thurber
Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long. Ogden Nash
If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought. Dante Alighieri
The best things in life aren t things. Art Buchwald
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundit s. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language c onvey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most ar tists and all humbug.
Cyril Connolly
I am two with nature. Woody Allen
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows u p.
Pablo Picasso
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The las t phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you ki ll the monster and fling him out to the public.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. Rainer Maria Rilke
There are two kinds of light the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscu res.
James Thurber
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painti ng has a life of its own.
Jackson Pollock
The best stories don t come from good vs. bad but from good vs. good. Leo Tolstoy
The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, moulded and constructed in a personal form and an original manner. Goethe
One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stu ck between her lower left molars, and who couldn t get it out all day long. I thou ght that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than de ntal floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. Jules Renard
Too clever is dumb. Ogden Nash
Rainer Maria Rilke
Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch. Francis Bacon
He had the look of one who had drained the cup of life and found a dead beetle a t the bottom.
P. G. Wodehouse
There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception. James Thurber
If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning. Robert Louis Stevenson
Every secret of a writer s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of hi s mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf
All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words. Amy Lowell
I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.
Henry James
These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thou sands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the m oonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fish es which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet o f line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feel ing a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extr emity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, wh
