T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...”
“The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.”
“The writer of the Bible were doing something far more significant than trying to write lessons and books and tell stories without errors. To describe the Bible as inerrant, then, is to use a word that actually minimises the importance of what these writers were up to”
Source: What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything
“The writer of these lines has nothing whatsoever to teach anyone; his words are just his contribution to our common discussion of what must inevitably be for us the most important subject which could be discussed by sentient beings.”
Source: Open Secret
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“The writer overthinks by necessity, collecting and complicating small details, while the tournament golfer needs to be simple, myopic, fixated on one detail at a time.”
Source: Paper Tiger: An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros
“The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.”
“The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.”
“The writer Richard Curtis is a genius.”
“The writer's characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable behavior for just that character, even when the character's action is, as sometimes happens, something that came as a surprise to the writer himself. We must understand, and the writer before us must understand, more than we know about the character; otherwise neither the writer nor the reader after him could feel confident of the character's behavior when the character acts freely.”
Source: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
“The writer’s job is to arouse emotions. The stronger the emotions the better.”
Source: Mr. Maniac
“The writer’s life is frightful”
“The writer’s life is frightful. I have experienced deep dispair, mental ill and attempt of suicide.”
“The writer’s method of attaining the essential was different from that of the thinker or the scientist. These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found “the terms of his appeal”. He appealed, said Conrad, “to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder… our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
Source: It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
“The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.”
“The writer's silent mind is a period of intermission before orchestrating a symphony of words.”
Source: The Little Book of Muses
“The writer’s special talent is to empathize with people and imagine their lives. We know them as we write them.”
“The writer sees himself reading to the mirror as always . . . He must check now and again to reassure himself that The Crime Of Separate Action has not, is not, cannot occur . . .
Anyone who has ever looked into a mirror knows what this crime is and what it means in terms of lost control when the reflection no longer obeys . . . Too late to dial P o l i c e . . .”
Source: Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
“The writer should always serve as his own angleworm —and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better.”
“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.”
“The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it.”
Source: Boy: Tales of Childhood
“The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.”
Source: Boy: Tales of Childhood
“The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that, perhaps, is what makes him different from others.”
Source: The Return of Hyman Kaplan
“The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable inall ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.”
“The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.”
“The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.”
“The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.”
Source: On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
“The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention.”
Source: Topics of Conversation
“The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.”
“The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.”
“The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.”
“The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.”
Source: Earthly Paradise
“The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.”
Source: Complete Collection of Edgar Allan Poe - 170+ eBooks (Complete Tales, Poems, Novels, Essays, Miscellaneous, Play)
“The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.”
Source: Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey: In Two Volumes
“The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.”
Source: The Complete Lyrics: 1978-2013
“The writer works in a lonely way.”
“The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don't know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It's not that I'm not interested-it's not where I live. I live inside the story.”
“The writer writes about what happened in order to make it make sense, to put it in perspective, to turn it into art; and art becomes the vehicle on which we ride out the truth of our experiences.”
“The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.”
“The writer's advantage, in some respects, over those whose expression lies in other fields, is in the privilege of a double - sometimes a triple - living. Pleasure multiplied in the mirrors of words, and pain siphoned off in words.”
“The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.”
Source: Killosophy
“The writer's duty is to keep on writing.”
Source: My Generation: Collected Nonfiction
“The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.”
“The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification.”
Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
“The writer's function is to prevent myths turning into allegories.”
“The writer's genetic inheritance and her or his experiences shape the writer into a unique individual, and it is this uniqueness that is the writer's only stuff for sale.”
“The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.”
“The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.”
“The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.”
Source: Conversations with Lillian Hellman