Writing Quotes - Page 39

• Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  College, Creative, Use

  FaceBook post by Kurt Vonnegut from Sep 26, 2012

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• Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

  Leo Rosten

  Mean, Self, Doe

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• An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

  François-René de Chateaubriand

  Originality, Originals

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations". 15th edition, 1980.

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• A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Book, Reviews, Critics

  "The Complete Neurotic's Notebook". Book by Mignon McLaughlin, 1981.

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• Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.

  Allegra Goodman

  Greatness, Forget, Tradition

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• Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together.

  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

  Thinking, Expression, Soul

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• You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

  Ray Bradbury

  Acceptance, Rejection, Favourite

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• Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

  Willa Cather

  Age, Fifteen, Famous Writers

  Quoted in Rene¤ Rapin Willa Cather (1930).

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• I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

  Agatha Christie

  Believe, Book, Memorable

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• The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Men, People, History

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• In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

  Sydney Smith

  Running, Ideas, Giving

  Sydney Smith, lady Saba (Smith) Holland Holland (1855). “A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith”, p.431

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• Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

  William Wordsworth

  Life, Beauty, Beautiful

  William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Ernest De Selincourt, Alan G. Hill, Chester Linn Shaver (1967). “The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Volume VIII. A Supplement of New Letters”, p.51, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

  Margaret Atwood

  Children, Names, Snow

  Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.43, Anchor

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• The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

  James Jones

  Men, Self, Guy

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• If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Motivational, Men, Soul

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.95, Ravenio Books

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• Beware of advice-even this.

  Carl Sandburg

  Advice, Design

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• Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.

  James T. Farrell

  Men

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• Do not write merely to be understood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Misunderstood, Understood

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• Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

  Edna Ferber

  Climbing, Interesting, Mountain

  Edna Ferber (1939). “A Peculiar Treasure”

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• A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Life, Witty

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “Reviews”, p.121, Oscar Wilde

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• To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

  Mark Twain

  Light, Ideas, Achievement

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• In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.

  Anton Chekhov

  Eye, Details, Description

  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1987). “The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings”

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• No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

  Robert Frost

  Book, Reading, Real Talk

  Collected Poems (1939) "Figure a Poem Makes"

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• Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Life, Being Alone, Creativity

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• If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Water, Movement, May

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