"What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?"
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 145 of 1537)
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"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."
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"I thought, If people are going to write about what I'm wearing, then I would wear young British designers who need the publicity."
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"I don't listen to what people say about me and I don't read what they write about me. People can compare me to anyone they want to, but I'm not going to worry about it."
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"Easy writing makes hard reading."
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"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day ... you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start."
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"My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing."
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"I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead."
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"You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that."
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"I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering."
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"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it."
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"The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do."
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"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now."
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"All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens."
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"My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything."
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"I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes."
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"Remember to get the weather in your damn book-weather is very important."
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"You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket."
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"It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better."
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"I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink."
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