Quotes About Writing

1] God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels. 2] But we moderns are impatient and destructive 3] And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious. 4] In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write, Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

We're simply operating on the premise that if there's anything your garden-variety Southerner likes to do more than harvesting, preparing, or consuming the region's superlative food and drink, it probably would be talking and writing about the very dishes and libations that have sustained us through this vale of tears for centuries.

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did

She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment.

One writes things and the implications shriek- it's like suddenly realizing one's deaf.

This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and 'voice' of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does.

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

Most men cannot write good sex.

What would his friends think? The Honorable Hatlee Beech, federal judge, writing prose like a faggot, extorting money out of innocent people.

Writers are generally split into two camps: those who carefully outline their stories and know the ending before they begin, and those who refuse to do so upon the theory that once a character is created he or she will do something interesting.

had a flair for the narrative

First and most important is to decide whether you want to write literary fiction, stuff you can't give away, hell, Bruce can't even sell it, or do you want to write something more popular.

Once she was settled and rested, she would plunge into her work and average at least a thousand words a day.

she would miss something important. The letters drained her. The lyrics put her to sleep. The novels produced migraines. The poetry could not be penetrated. She wrote back twice a week, without fail, because if she neglected her youngest by even a day or so, she could expect a torrent of abuse, a four-pager or maybe a five-pager with

She wrote well, in the standard, scholarly legal fashion of long sentences filled with large words. But she was clear. She avoided the double-talk and legal lingo most students strive so desperately for. She would never make it as an attorney employed by the United States Government.

are generally split into two camps: those who carefully outline their stories and know the ending before they begin, and those who refuse to do so upon the theory that once a character is created he or she will do something interesting

Contents About the Book About the Author Also by John Grisham Title Page Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter

Wittgenstein sent the Tractatus to several publishers who rejected it, including his own university press — Cambridge, which was to distinguish itself by rejecting all his writing.

Don't concentrate on becoming a better humor writer, just concentrate on being the best writer that you can become. If you're funny, the work will end up being funny. And if you're not funny, the work will still end up being good. Concentrate on being the most honest writer you can be, and let everything else follow--because it will.

The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.

This is a writer's lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE - TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY!; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS!

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.