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Matthew Arnold

People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

Jorge Luis Borges

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double li

James Atlas

If you don???t have a six-figure deal by the time you???re thirty-five, you???ve failed. In fact, why even be a writer?

Jorge Luis Borges

[I]t is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of pap

Ray Bradbury

Richard Bach with this book does two things. He gives me Flight. He makes me Young. For both I am deeply grateful.

Sir Winston Churchill

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the mons

Agatha Christie

I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body

Cyril Connolly

I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits. It is the style of all the writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean to and more than they feel. It is the style of most artists and all

Gene Fowler

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html

Benjamin Disraeli

An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Alfred Hitchcock

It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter . . . This wiser effort would have been, to diff

Montesquieu

The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generatio

Dorothy Parker

A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shi

George Orwell

Mr Wells [???]belongs to the non military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swash-buckling side of life

Sir John Mortimer

Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come.

Enrique Jardiel Poncela

???If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.???

Logan Pearsall Smith

But words came halting forth, wanting Invention???s stay;Invention, Nature???s child, fled step-dame Study???s blows...Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,???Fool,??? said my Muse to me; ???look in thy heart and write.???

John Updike

Write out of love, write out of instinct, write out of reason. But always for money.

William Makepeace Thackeray

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Gore Vidal

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame, if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.

William Carlos Williams

From reincarnated sources and through prenatal causes I was born with unquenchable hope and unfaltering faith in God and guardian spirits. I often wept myself to sleep after a day of disappointments and worries but woke in the morning singing aloud with

Colin Wilson

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated??”thrown aside??”a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

Robertson Davies

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.

Mark S. Hertzog

There are authors who write to communicate, there are authors who write to impress themselves.

Anais Nin

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Writing only leads to more writing.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

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 the mirror which waits always before or behind.

S. O'Brien

Great writing is a submission to a creative force that seems to use the writer as an instrument. The writer finds that the words stream out, almost as if someone else were producing them. Writing becomes a process of discovery.

James Burke

When the printing press was developed in the fifteenth century it was said that printed books would make reading and writing the infatuation of people who have no business reading and writing.

Johann von Goethe

The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.

Anon.

Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written.

Albert Camus

How many crimes are committed simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.

POPE: _E. on Criticism,_ Pt. iii., Line 59.

Most authors steal their works, or buy; Garth did not write his own Dispensary,

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors.

Julie Arabi

All good men are happy when they choose to be their own authors. Those who choose to have others edit their pathways, must live on the edge of another man's sword.

Sir Winston Churchill

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

E. B. White

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Benjamin Disraeli

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Steven Wright

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Colin Campbell

Indeed, the Founders mentioned the pagan authors in so many heartfelt speeches, pamphlets and letters that today's sweeping references to America's 'Christian' roots and 'Judeo-Christian heritage' ought to be amended. Maybe these terms should be reserved to explain the traditional religions and morality of individuals, families, congregations, small communitities. Politically, our notions of virtue and vice have had another genesis.

Steven Wright

I've writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.

Stanislaw Lec

Advice to writers Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

Marsha Norman

Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.

Cyril Connolly

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.

William Makepeace Thackeray

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Truman Capote

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.

Douglas Engelbart

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

Steven Wright

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done, so now Ijust have to fill in the rest.

Ernest Hemingway

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

Joan Baez

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

Isabel Colegate

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.

John Gregory Dunne

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

Thomas a Kempis

Never be entirely idle but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

S. G. Tallentyre

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.N. B. This quote is commonly attributed to Voltaire, but it is not found in his writing.

Real Live Preacher

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youre doing, or it comes out flat. You cant fake your way through this.

Robert Benchley

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Russell Baker

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Etty Hillesum

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.

SHEFFIELD, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE: _Essay on Poetry._

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Jim Davis

There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.

Sir Winston Churchill

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the mons

Truman Capote

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

John LeCarre

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

Steven Wright

My friend has a baby. I'm writing down all the noises the baby makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

Enrique Jardiel Poncela

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

Richard Harding Davis

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

Benjamin Franklin

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.

Lillian Hellman

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Ernest Hemingway

When writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Cyril Connolly

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be read once.

Jessamyn West

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

Brenda Ueland

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten--happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

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.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.

God is love, but get it in writing.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

If I had been using Windoze, I'd still be writing this.

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

Television has raised writing to a new low.

Vigorous writing is concise.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Good writing takes more than just time; it wants your best moments and the best of you.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you???re doing, or it comes out flat. You can???t fake your way through this.

'I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.' - Steven Wright

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.

That everybody is allowed to learn to read spoileth in the long run not only writing but thinking.

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

'Tis hard to tell if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill. - Alexander Pope

"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins commited in previous lives.

When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech-one does not, at least, hear how inadequate the words are.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

...Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded...

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem, or saying a prayer.

Report writing, like motor-car driving and love-making, is one of those activities which almost every Englishman thinks he can do well without instruction. The results are of course usually abominable.

For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the i

"Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting."

"Creative writing is fine, so long as it remains on topic." - T. Ellis

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making.

"And I'm wondering who could be writing this song" -Pink Floyd