156 quotes found
“For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern no...”
“Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.”
“A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.”
“Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of hi...”
“Writing is hardIt gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because its no longer a hobby, its no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world...”
“But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.”
“Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.”
“The way my mind flows is conducive to self-learning. I do better obsessively studying various writers and writing techniques and writing theories on my own than I would do if I were in a classroom ...”
“A story is a part of the writer's soul, told to the world.”
“Committing your thoughts and feelings to words is like putting your soul on a plate and hoping the diners will like what they eat.”
“When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.”
“The writer doesnt want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesnt want to ta...”
“Do you know why I believe in the novel? Its a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, so...”
“It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.”
“He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room".”
“When a writer doesnt show his face, he becomes a local symptom of Gods famous reluctance to appear.”
“As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two...”
“Writer's a lovers quarrel - encounters breathe the quill...”
“If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is expla...”
“The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutr...”
