Share and Discuss Writing Quotes!

[MikeK]

Kate Vannah, an associate of E.A. Robinson, contrasting their writing styles:

"He says it takes him six weeks to write a sonnet. It takes me ten minutes. One of us is crazy."

[Virgil]

Oh, I had forgotten this thread. I love this thread. Here's one:

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
Thomas Mann

[RobinHood3000]

Ooooh, I like that one, Virg - nice find.

[toni]

That's a good one, Uncle Virg! I too. have forgotten this thread...

Quotes from Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing

• Write with zest, inscribe with vigor, report your hatreds and despairs with a kind of love.

• Stay drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy you.

• Quickness is truth and the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.

• If you are writing without zest, without gusto...you are only half a writer.

• Not to write, for many of us, is to die..

[toni]

I found some more!

• If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing.
  ~ Kingsley Amis

• One of the most feared expressions in modern times is "The computer is down."
  ~ Norman Augustine

• You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If somebody drives it off a cliff, that's it.
  ~Rita Mae Brown

• I don't want to take up literature in a money-making spirit, or be very anxious about making large profits, but selling it at a loss is another thing altogether, and an amusement I cannot well afford.
  ~ Lewis Carroll

• The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
  ~ Raymond Chandler

• The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
  ~ Robert Cromier

• I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
  ~ Peter De Vries

• If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
  ~ William Faulkner

• Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
  
  
  You don't write because you want to say something' you write because you've got something to say.
  ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

• They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
  ~ Lillian Hellman

• A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
  ~ Ernest Hemingway

• Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
  ~ William Ralph Inge

• Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ASK questions. If I had answers I'd be a politician.
  ~ Eugene Ionesco

• The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
  ~ James Joyce

• Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less materials you need
  ~ Charles F. Kettering

• I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.
  ~ D. H. Lawrence

• A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
  ~ Thomas Mann

• When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can sure it but the scratching of a pen.
  ~ Samuel Lover

• Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.
  ~ Jules Renard

• The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend.
  ~ Isaac B. Singer

• What's this business of being a writer. It's just putting one word after another.
  ~ Irving Thalberg

• The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug.
  ~ Mark Twain

• There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.
  ~ Jessamyn West

[MikeK]

A few others:


Robert Frost:

- Why poetry is in school more than it seems to be outside in the world, the children haven't been told. They must wonder.

- We write in school chiefly because to try our hand at writing should make us better readers.

- Practise of an art is more salutary than talk about it. There is nothing more composing than composition.

- The eye reader is a barbarian. So also is the writer for the eye reader, who needn't care how badly he writes since he doesn't care how badly he is read.

- And sometimes my objection to it [free verse] is that it's a pose. It's not honest. When a man sets out consciously to tear up forms and rhythms and measures, then he is not interested in giving you poetry. he just wants to perform; he wants to show you his tricks. He will get an effect; nobody will deny that, but it is not a harmonious effect.

- For my pleasure I had as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

- I have come to the conclusion that style in prose or verse is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying.

- You've got to refrain from saying the common places of wisdom and reason and damn yourself back till you break out in little bits all your own.

- I had it from one of the youngest lately: "Whereas we once thought literature should be without content, we now know it should be charged full of propaganda." Wrong twice, I told him.

T.E. Hulme:

- Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose - a train that delivers you at a destination.

George Orwell:

- It [the English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

- As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of WORDS chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of PHRASES tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

- A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will aks himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is unavoidably ugly?

- What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.

- ...he [Whitman] is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of making you feel it.

Edgar Allen Poe:

- Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.

[dramasnot6]

i adored the George Orwell ones you posted Mikek! That man was so brilliant.....

[MikeK]

i adored the George Orwell ones you posted Mikek! That man was so brilliant.....

Exactly. Everyone knows him for his 'political' writing (Animal Farm, 1984, and certain essays), but his insights into writing itself and literature were amazing. His essays on Dickens, Kipling, Chesterton...all extremely insightful.

[toni]

Writing a story is like playing out your dreams while you are awake. It's not about being inspired by your dreams, but conciously manipulating the unconcious and creating your own dream. - Haruki Murakami

[Green_Ghost]

It'd be great if someone could help me disect this quote a little more, and just explain it. I have to write an essay on it with examples from works that we've read in class about realism and naturalism. I think I understand most of it but I'm probably missing something... Thanks.

"[The naturalists] consider that man cannon be seperated from his surroundings, that he is completed by his clothes, his house, his city, and his country; and hence we shall not note a single phenomenon of his brain or heart without looking for the causes or the consequences in his surroundings."
-Emile Zola

[dramasnot6]

I think it's getting at that , according to naturalists,ones identity is shaped by their environment. By "brain or heart" I think it refers to ones behaviour and value and belief system to also be shaped by ones environment. Overall it is trying to state the importance of your personal context and how it defines you.

[toni]

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov

[cziffra]

why hasn't the world produced more shakespeares if "nothing comes from nothing"? the ability to write is as innate a talent as the accuracy and strength of a professional quarterback. sure, cultivation is necessary, but the predisposition for greatness is already there, etched in a person's DNA. a hard pill to swallow for many---shattering the "democratic" ideal that we all start out on an equal footing and progress the same. in his Tempting of America, former supreme court us justice nominee (& genius) Robert Bork called this 'nothing comes from nothing' notion a happy dream from happy dreamers.

I've often wondered about this. If it's possible to be born a genius, is it also possible to be born evil? And if so, does it mean the genius doesn't deserve praise and the evil don't deserve punishment?

A dangerous topic, i know, and one i have no conclusions for. I'd like to think we aren't born with such qualities, but when you read a shakespeare or listen to beethoven or try to understand how newton and einstein (etc) could possibly have done what they did (ignoring for the moment a so called person such as stalin and his unbelievable capacity for sadism) it's quite overwhelming. how could these people have done such things without a little divine assistance? or is it all simply learnt?

[Midas]

Most of these quotes here, if not all, and many more, one can find so easily by tapping the keys on any search engine.

Here is one, I regret, you will not find on the internet (yet), except here, where it has been partially quoted in another thread, in another section.

'Writing is merely painting a picture with words. Good writing comes from how the artist chooses and applies his/her colours, communicates what he/she 'sees' and 'feels' to others, and stirs their passion for more'

Who wrote that? Sorry, I am too modest to say. (smile)

[DATo]

"To create is to steal. When a cow eats grass the cow does not become grass, the grass becomes a cow."

- Eric Hoffer