Quotes About Writing

You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing...Or else something else to write about.

You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly.

If you want to write, keep cats.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say ... Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel-works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.

Las palabras pueden ser como los rayos X si se emplean adecuadamente: pasan a través de todo. Las lees y te traspasan. Ésta es una de las cosas que intento enseñar a mis alumnos: a escribir de manera penetrante.

I should like a thoroughly bad climate," he answered. "I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms

But silence and the topless dark Vault in the lights of Luna Park; And Blackpool from the nightly gloom Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb. He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. What genius I had then! he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly six months since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never write anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it, he wondered?

Da se napiše loša knjiga, treba isto toliko truda kao i da se napiše dobra.

You'd be the first to complain if people didn't write,' Judd rapped out. 'Here's your egg. Boiled for three minutes exactly. I saw to it myself.' Taking his egg, 'On the contrary,' Fanning answered, 'I'd be the first to rejoice. If people write, it means they exist; and all I ask is to be able to pretend that the world doesn't exist.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

Le style c'est I'homme. No doubt. But the converse is also partly true. L'homme c'est le style. Because we have a gift for writing in a certain way, we find ourselves, in some sort, becoming our way of writing. We mould ourselves in the likeness of our particular brand of eloquence.

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

Kad ?ovek pomisli - re?e Kadrus obaraju?i ruku na hartiju - da se pomo?u ovoga može ubiti ?ovek sigurnije nego kada bi ga neko ?ekao u zasedi u šumi da ga ubije! Ja sam se uvek bojao pera, boce mastila i lista hartije više nego ma?a ili pištolja.

Écrire à quelqu'un est la seule manière de l'attendre sans se faire de mal.

Leemos libros porque nos cambian la vida, porque nos conducen a la verdad. Leemos libros porque aprendemos muchas cosas. Pero escribimos libros con otra idea. Cuando escribimos, lo que hacemos es elegir entre lo más raro que hay en nuestro universo y entre lo más querido que hay en nuestro ánimo.

I got a little tape recorder and laid it on my chest and kept describing the scene as I saw it. Just the opening scenes took about 45 minutes. I don't know how it's going to end, but I like it that way. If I knew how it ended, I'd lose interest in the story.

Any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill.

Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.

It would be wonderful, she thought, to write a book which would help other people.

He fingered the note, as if it were a talisman. A letter from a lover is always like that, he thought. It carries the sympathetic magic of the hand that wrote it; that hand. He