"It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 281 of 1537)
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"Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experience he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours' relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey."
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"People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are."
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"Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it."
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"There are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can't help themselves, they've got to do it. They're prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning."
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"Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man."
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"The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so."
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"A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have."
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"My little notebooks were beginnings - they were the ground into which I dropped the seed... I would work in this way when I was out in the crowds, then put the stuff together at home."
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"Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work."
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"The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything."
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"It's fun to write about myself, but I feel like I would bore people with that."
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"I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing."
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"The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem-at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty."
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"The only way to get love is to be lovable. It's very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: "I'll buy a million dollars' worth of love." But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get."
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"Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option."
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"When you consider what you would love to accomplish in your life but feel ill-prepared to bring it about, picture the eighty-nine Michelangelo living five centuries ago, painting, sculpting, and writing. Imagine he is telling you that you can create whatever you desire, and the great danger is not in having too much hope, but in reaching what you have perceived as hopeless."
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"Get your passion on the paper. Detach from the outcome. Forget about whether it's going to get published."
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"Writing isn't something I do, writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me."
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"Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment."
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