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Quote
Collection:
"The
beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right
the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do
it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping
simile."
--Robert
Cormier
"The
idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through
the brain and goes straight to the heart" - Maya Angelou.
"As a general rule, the most successful man in life is
the man who has the best information." - Benjamin
Disraeli
"Waiting
for inspiration to write is like standing at the airport
waiting for a
train." --
Leigh Michaels
The
heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If
you can not write well, you can not think well, and if you can
not think well, others will do your thinking for
you." --George Orwell
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best
sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones
who discover what is most important and strangest and most
pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of
their work, despite the difficulties."
.......Bonnie Friedman
"There are only three colors, ten digits, and seven
notes;
its what we do with them that's important."
.......Ruth Ross
"Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just
have to do it."
.......Natalie Goldberg
We conquer, not in any brilliant fashion, we conquer by
continuing."
.......George Matheson
It is never too late to be what you might have been."
.......George Elliot
"All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware
of a potential and believe they're not reaching it."
.......William Saroyan
"To live a creative life, we must lost our fear of being
wrong."
.......Joseph Chilton Pearce
I
think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of
blank paper.
Steve
Martin
Pen,
paper, perseverance, and proficiency.
Duane
Alan Hahn
It
is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich
Nietzsche
The
most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Thomas
Jefferson
A
writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other
people.
Thomas
Mann
I
love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter
De Vries
It
took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't
give it up because by that time I was too famous.
--Robert
Benchley
If
you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley
Amis
I
write to teach myself what I already know.
Duane
Alan Hahn
Put
down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an
author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy
most of it.
Colette
There's
a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together.
Josh
Billings
Writers
should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne
Du Maurier
- The pen is mightier than the sword.
- Edward
Bulwer-Lytton (1803 - 1873), Richelieu
- Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an
approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
- Leonard Bernstein (1918 - 1990)
- I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took
out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
- Oscar
Wilde (1854 - 1900
- You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
- Ray
Bradbury (1920 - ), advice to writers
- There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows
what they are.
- W.
Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965
- We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.
- W.
Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)
- The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can
write know anything.
- Walter
Bagehot (1826 - 1877)
Success is spelled W - O - R - K
--Robert Schuller
It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes
a writer.
--Gerald Brenan
You can't sit around and wait for inspiration. You have to go
after it with a club.
--Jack London
We all have some talent. We could all use some more. But we
should all keep writing.
-- Julie Beard
Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph,
sink your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him
against the wall until the tag line.
--Paul O'Neil
When talented people write well, it is generally for this
reason: they're moved by a desire to touch the audience.
--Robert McKee
Having harvested all the knowledge and wisdom we can from our
mistakes and failures, we should put them behind us and go
ahead.
--Edith Johnson
Every word
written is a victory against death.
Michel Butor
Better to write
for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
Writing is a
cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create,
direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.
Monica Dickens
For your born
writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right
word.
Catherine Drinker
Bowen
Neither man nor
God is going to tell me what to write.
James T. Farrell
The reason one
writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has
something to say.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are many
reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to
create an alternative world.
John Fowles
There is more
pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.
Edward Gibbon
Close the door.
Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other
people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and
only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver
No one is able
to enjoy such feast than the one who throws a party in his own mind.
Selma Lagerlöf
We are a species
that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share
this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Anne Lamott
Are we, who want
to create, in some way specially talented people? Or has everybody else simply
given up, either by preassures of modesty or laziness, and closed their ears
from their inner need to create, until that need has died, forgotten and
abandoned? When you look at children, you start to think the latter. I still
haven't met a child who doesn't love - or who at least hasn't loved - drawing,
writing or some other creative activity.
Natalia Laurila
My purpose is to
entertain myself first and other people secondly.
John D. MacDonald
Writing is the
best way to talk without being interrupted.
Jules Renard
Reading usually
precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading.
Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
Writing is the
only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem
Like everyone
else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as
there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by
proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.
J. Michael
Straczynski
Write something
to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody
and scarcely anyone will care for it.
Jesse Stuart
I learned that
you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a
child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one
bead on after another.
Brenda Ueland
I
am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear
is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the
sound he hears within.
Gustave
Flaubert
A blank piece of
paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God.
Sidney Sheldon
There is nothing
to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Red Smith
Writing
is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell
on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.
Jessamyn
West
Through
joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through
thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I
wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I
wrote it is unnecessary to say.
Edgar
A. Poe
All
that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is
everything. What we think, we become.
Buddha
Writing
is thinking on paper.
William
Zinsser
Writing
is a lot easier if you have something to say
Sholem
Asch
Put
weather in.
Joseph
Hansen
If
you think that something small cannot make a difference, try
going to sleep with a mosquito in the room.
Anonymous
Everything
that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can
use it in some story.
Tapani
Bagge
All
good ideas arrive by chance.
Max
Ernst
Writing
is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world
wants to read your diary except your mother.
Richard
Peck
I
keep six honest serving men
They
taught me all I knew;
Their
names are What and Why and When
and
How and Where and Who.
Rudyard
Kipling
Many
modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip
Larkin
The wastepaper
basket is the writer's best friend.
Isaac Bashevis
Singer
By writing much,
one learns to write well.
Robert Southey
When you
judge another, you do not define them, you define
yourself. --Wayne Dyer
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