Quotes About Writing

Without knowing I had been Tut's child all the while, writing the Red World's hieroglyphics, thinking I thrived futures even in dust-rinsed pasts.

Y para eso escribo, escribo, escribo, al mediodía o a las tres de la madrugada. Para no estar muerto.

Father had to choose between finishing a story or playing with the girls. I chose to play, of course, which endangered the family income. An office had to be found. We couldn't afford one.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. Secondly, writing is survival.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and

Hers was simply not a pew shaped spine.

In his half-sleep last night he had felt something writing on the insides of his eyelids.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...

The six stories in this volume are the result of some three or four years of occasional work. The dates of their writing are far apart, their origins are various. None of them are connected directly with personal experiences. In all of them the facts are inherently true, by which I mean that they are not only possible but that they have actually happened.

A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.

Never commence a sentence with And, But, Since, Because, and other similar weak words and never end it with prepositions, small, weak adverbs or pronouns.

There are four simple moods,—the Infinitive, the Indicative, the Imperative and the Subjunctive.

subjects. Directions. CHAPTER XIII CHOICE OF WORDS

The three essentials of the English language are: Purity, Perspicuity and Precision.

the adverb as near as possible to the word it

When writing a letter the street laborer should bear in mind that only the letter of a street-laborer is expected from him, no matter to whom his communication may be addressed and that neither the grammar nor the diction of a Chesterfield or Gladstone is looked for in his language.

In order to speak and write the English language correctly, it is imperative that the fundamental principles of the Grammar be mastered, for no matter how much we may read of the best authors, no matter how much we may associate with and imitate the best speakers

comma: John, you are a good man. In numeration, commas are used to express periods of three figures: Mountains 25,000 feet high; 1,000,000 dollars. The Semicolon marks a slighter connection than the

To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment....

The book of Jubilees states that Enoch, the early patriarch, 'was the first one from among the children of men that are born on the Earth to learn writing and the knowledge of wisdom—and he wrote the signs of heaven'. These signs (from the Table of Destiny) are described as being the 'science of the Watchers', which had been carved in a rock in distant times, and Enoch

I would argue that coffee has been far more important to literature than alcohol.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.