Writing By Writers Quotes - Page 2

• 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

  Writing, Want, Satisfaction

  Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine (1971). “Mark Twain's notebook”, Scholarly Pr

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• I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Funny Life, Writing, Sound

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• Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

  Harlan Ellison

  Book, Writing, World

  "Quit Your Day Job!: How to Sleep Late, Do What You Enjoy, and Make a Ton of Money as a Writer". Book by Jim Denney and James D. Denney, 2003.

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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

  Morning, Writing, Color

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers (Annotated Edition)”, p.86, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Intuition, Way

  Ray Bradbury, Steven L. Aggelis (2004). “Conversations with Ray Bradbury”, p.124, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Epic, Study

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• Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

  Winston Churchill

  Book, Writing, Adventure

  Winston Churchill (1965). “Winston Churchill, His Wit and Wisdom: Selections from His Works and Speeches”

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• Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Pay, Offers

  Mark Twain (1992). “Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, Volume 1: 1852-1890”, p.644, Library of America

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• A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

  Sidney Sheldon

  Writing, Pieces, Paper

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• Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

  Gore Vidal

  Writing, Born, Company

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

  John Ruskin

  Writing, Reader, Skip

  "A Joy for Ever". Book by John Ruskin, note 6, 1857.

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• Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

  Jules Renard

  Success, Writing, People

  Jules Renard, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Roget (2008). “The Journal of Jules Renard”, p.286, Tin House Books

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• Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

  William Wordsworth

  Life, Beauty, Beautiful

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Ernest De Selincourt, Alan G. Hill, Chester Linn Shaver (1967). “The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Volume VIII. A Supplement of New Letters”, p.51, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

  Harlan Ellison

  Morning, Writing, Thinking

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• I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

  Isaac Asimov

  Life, Writing, Breathe

  Isaac Asimov (1995). “Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Lifetime of Letters”, Doubleday Books

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• If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.

  Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien

  Writing, Character, Emotional

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• Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.

  Arthur Bryant

  Writers And Writing

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• Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

  Anthony Burgess

  Sex, Writing, Literature

  Anthony Burgess (2012). “Little Wilson and Big God”, p.173, Random House

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• Writers are always selling somebody out.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Journalism, Selling

  Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968) p. xvi

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• Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

  Willa Cather

  Writing, Age, Fifteen

  Quoted in Rene¤ Rapin Willa Cather (1930).

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• The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Mean, Pushing

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.216, Univ of California Press

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• Read, read read. Read everything.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Famous Writers, Writers Reading

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• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

  Ray Bradbury

  Inspirational, Writing, Reality

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• Exercise the writing muscle every day.

  Jane Yolen

  Writing, Exercise, Muscles

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• The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

  Robert Benchley

  Writing, Men, Pieces

  James Thurber, The Bermudian Magazine, November 1950.

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