Quotes About Writing

Hawthorne finally found his life's calling. "I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels," he wrote passionately to his mother. "So I don't see that there is anything left for me but to be an author.

Interestingly, relatively few of my correspondents were of the variety familiar to most authors, the users of block capitals and red ink.

Now he understood why he hated Luis Goodman and other writers so much. He was a damaged person, but not damaged enough to make a life out of it.

beautifully bungled prepositions. Language

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limit oneself to dreaming it.

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer...In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer's ghost.

In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer's ghost.

But shall I have the strength to write this book? For there is a great distance between the words we speak uninhibitedly to a friendly audience and the discipline needed to write a book. When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious reflection.

Ce qui ne peut être écrit mérite-t-il d'être vécu ?

An author really ought to have nothing but flowers in the room where he works.

But perhaps the real reason we keep writing is the hope naïve perhaps that we'll make a better job of it next time. Unless you're a genius or a fool you realize that everything you write however "successful " is always a sort of failure. And so you try again.

Go litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! But litel book, no makyng thow n'envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

Todo lo que se escribe, se escribe para nuestra enseñanza.»

Not long before her death, Mary Soames, Churchill's last surviving child, said about her father, 'The thing to remember is that he was a journalist.' So he was, and in his double career as politician and journalist, the writing enriched him, with earnings far larger than even the prime minister's salary, while also tempting him to play his habitual role as a lone wolf, free of party loyalty.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

I do not know what I think until I write it.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Style is a sort of melody that comes into my sentences by itself. If a writer says what he has to say as accurately and effectively as he can, his style will take care of itself.

Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality...

Spisovate? je ?lovek, ktorému nesta?ia knihy tých druhých.