A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
The more you read, the more you calm down.
There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off your goals.
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.
The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.
If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.
In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.
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