"I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 356 of 1537)
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"The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them."
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"All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!"
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"I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality."
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"People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least."
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"The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf."
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"Letter-writing I imagine is counted as 'work' from which you must abstain, and I scribble this letter simply from the self-satisfied notion that you will like to hear from me. You see, I have asked no questions, which are the torture-screws of correspondence. Hence you have nothing to answer."
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"When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech-one does not, at least, hear how inadequate the words are."
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"Money to a writer is time to write."
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"But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write."
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"You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing."
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"I prefer to write and draw in the privacy of my home and with total freedom and then take it to the lion's den."
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"The whole idea of action being a carrier of information is something that comes directly from theater. That's, in some ways, the one thing I've been trying to contribute. I still write things outside of architecture - not really fiction, but not nonfiction. I like dialogue as a form, because the text is only the trace of an action. The consequential information is carried in the action you choose to put on that text."
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"It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life."
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"After so many deaths I live and write."
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"Although I have guitars all around and I pick themm up occasionally and write a tune and make a record, I don't really see myself as a musician. It may seem a funny thing to say. It's just like, I write lyrics amd I make up songs, but I'm not a great lyricist or songwriter or producer. It's when you put all these things together - that makes me."
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"Nobody can write such ironic things unless he has a deep sense of injustice-injustice to those members of the race who are victims of the stupid, the pretentious and the hypocritical."
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"I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old."
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"Thomas Hauser respects boxing and boxers. He gives readers insight into what happens in and out of the ring. Everything he writes is fair-minded and reality-based with a human touch."
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"If you asked someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer."
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