Writing Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Samuel Johnson,
Mark Twain
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| Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. |
| - Franklin P. Adams |
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| No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. |
| - Henry B. Adams |
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| Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially. |
| - Amos Bronson Alcott |
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| Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. |
| - Hannah Arendt |
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| Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. |
| - Sholem Asch |
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| If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster. |
| - Isaac Asimov |
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| A metaphor is like a simile. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| 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. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. |
| - Francis Bacon |
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| 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. |
| - Joan Baez |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. |
| - Ray Bradbury |
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| They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. |
| - Robert Burton |
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| Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. |
| - Samuel Butler |
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| When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. |
| - Samuel Butler |
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| If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. |
| - Lord Byron |
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| To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. |
| - Lord Byron |
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| The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. |
| - Elias Canetti |
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| To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. |
| - Truman Capote |
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| Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. |
| - Orson Scott Card |
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| There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters. |
| - Miguel de Cervantes |
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| For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. |
| - John Cheever |
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| Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. |
| - Anton Chekhov |
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| A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. |
| - Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
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| You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world. |
| - Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
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| The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. |
| - Agatha Christie |
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| Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not drive on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| Sit down, and 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 |
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| Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason. They made no such demand upon those who wrote them. |
| - Charles Caleb Colton |
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| 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 |
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| 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. |
| - Samuel McChord Crothers |
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| Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man. |
| - Emily Dickinson |
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| 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 |
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| Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. |
| - E.L. Doctorow |
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| Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. |
| - Theodore Dreiser |
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| Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers. |
| - T.S. Eliot |
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| It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. |
| - Havelock Ellis |
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| The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant. |
| - Edna Ferber |
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| An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. |
| - Gustave Flaubert |
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| Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. |
| - Gene Fowler |
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| The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. |
| - André Gide |
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| What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told. |
| - André Gide |
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| One hates an author that's all author. |
| - George Gordon |
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| Easy reading is damn hard writing. |
| - Nathaniel Hawthorne |
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| Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. |
| - Nathaniel Hawthorne |
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| Every writer I know has trouble writing. |
| - Joseph Heller |
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| The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. |
| - Ernest Hemingway |
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| Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else. |
| - Etty Hillesum |
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| A man will turn over half a library to make one book. |
| - Samuel Johnson |
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| Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. |
| - Samuel Johnson |
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| The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. |
| - Samuel Johnson |
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| Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. |
| - Franz Kafka |
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| A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. |
| - Karl Kraus |
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| My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin. |
| - Karl Kraus |
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| Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may. |
| - Walter Savage Landor |
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| I am a man, and alive.... For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog. |
| - D.H. Lawrence |
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| When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can. |
| - Samuel Lover |
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| No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. |
| - Russell Lynes |
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| 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 Mailer |
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| A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. |
| - Thomas Mann |
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| 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 |
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| A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. |
| - William Somerset Maugham |
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| The best style is the style you don't notice. |
| - William Somerset Maugham |
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| An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| 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 |
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| I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. |
| - James Albert Michener |
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| I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. |
| - James Albert Michener |
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| If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. |
| - Toni Morrison |
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| Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? |
| - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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| The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. |
| - Anaïs Nin |
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| 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 |
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| And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. |
| - Sylvia Plath |
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| He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. |
| - John Ray |
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| The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. |
| - Jules Renard |
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| Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. |
| - Jules Renard |
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| Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. |
| - Rainer Maria Rilke |
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| It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. |
| - Vita Sackville-West |
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| 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 |
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| The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. |
| - Isaac Bashevis Singer |
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| What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. |
| - Logan Pearsall Smith |
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| What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach. |
| - Logan Pearsall Smith |
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| I do not like to write - I like to have written. |
| - Gloria Steinem |
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| An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. |
| - Adlai E. Stevenson |
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| 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 bunch of happy chuckleheads. |
| - William Styron |
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| 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 |
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| Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. |
| - Dylan Thomas |
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| A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible. |
| - Leo Tolstoy |
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| 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 |
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| As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| 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 |
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| The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. |
| - John Updike |
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| I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. |
| - Peter De Vries |
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| Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. |
| - Fay Weldon |
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| There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. |
| - Jessamyn West |
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| Be obscure clearly. |
| - E.B. White |
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| Writing is both mask and unveiling. |
| - E.B. White |
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| As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. |
| - Virginia Woolf |
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| Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. |
| - William Wordsworth |
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