"The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 95 of 1537)
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"We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates."
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"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
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"It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends."
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"You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written."
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"Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music."
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"One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words."
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"When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing."
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"A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out."
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"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."
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"You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough to not think about all the things that might go wrong."
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"Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up."
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"Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love."
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"Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life."
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"Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper."
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"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."
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"I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?"
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"You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year"
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"Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible."
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"Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth."
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