Tuesday, March 07, 2006

here's some quotes about writing:

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. - T. S. Eliot

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." - Gustave Flaubert

A metaphor is like a simile. ~Author Unknown

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man. ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. ~Enrique Jardiel Poncela

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. ~Sholem Asch

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. ~Burton Rascoe

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ~Agatha Christie

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. ~Don Marquis

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. ~E.L. Doctorow

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. ~Norman MailerWriters at Work, 3rd series, PMB-->

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ~Author Unknown

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ~Jean Luc Godard

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. ~Jules Renard

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. ~Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme, 1802

I do not like to write - I like to have written. ~Gloria Steinem

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. ~G.K. Chesterton

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman. ~Van Wyck Brooks

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. ~Samuel Johnson

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

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. ~John Updike

1 comment:

la dahlia said...

I like those.