1,322 quotes found
“True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”
“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.”
“A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.”
“People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.Of course, some people ...”
“Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that ...”
“There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”
“One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more...”
“The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling ag...”
“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
“CALVIN:Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien.”
“Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college. ”
“Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.”
“I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”
“Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”
“A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.”
“I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.”
“DWIGHT:Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.”
“He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.”
