Best difficulty & writing Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.”

Writing Film Certain Literature My Own Cases Reader Difficulty Limitation Viewers Concentrating

Author:Manuel Puig

“I realized going back and writing and explaining in details the difficulties I had lived actually became emotional again. It's like therapy but sometimes therapy can be painful. But it's part of life and part of the autobiography so I'll have to finish it sooner or later.”

Writing Sometimes Emotional Difficulty Painful Details I Realized Therapy Sooner Or Later Autobiography Explaining Parts Of Life

Author:Jenni Rivera

“No matter what difficulty you are facing, it is coming from Divine Light to bring you to a higher place within. Write down every conceivable reason that this situation can contribute towards your growth. Write down every way this experience can possibly set the stage for serving to uplift others. When you are complete, and have come to the other side of this experience, you will then know 'why' it happened.”

Knows Way Writing Matter Reason Light Sides Growth Situation Happened Stage Divine Higher Difficulty No Matter What Uplifting Serving Divine Light

Author:Barbara Rose

“But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.”

Source: Kora in Hell: Improvisations

“Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.”

People Writing Has Beens Today Past House Memories Marriage Streets Century Fields Difficulty Lips Chiefs Association Echoes English Words

Author:Virginia Woolf

“The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.”

Writing Sex Difficulty Difficulty Of Writing

Book:The Golden Notebook

Source: The Golden Notebook

“Consultation and compliance can conduce little to the perfection of any literary performance; for whoever is so doubtful of his own abilities as to encourage the remarks of others, will find himself every day embarrassed with new difficulties, and will harass his mind, in vain, with the hopeless labour of uniting heterogeneous ideas, digesting independent hints, and collecting into one point the several rays of borrowed light, emitted often with contrary directions.”

Source: Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings

“Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.”

Thinking Writing Trouble Please Difficulty

Book:The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752

Source: The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752

“If an author be supposed to involve his thoughts in voluntary obscurity, and to obstruct, by unnecessary difficulties, a mind eager in the pursuit of truth; if he writes not to make others learned, but to boast the learning which he possesses himself, and wishes to be admired rather than understood, he counteracts the first end of writing, and justly suffers the utmost severity of censure, or the more afflicting severity of neglect.”

Ifs Writing Mind Firsts Ends Suffering Wish Understood Difficulty Pursuit Neglect Unnecessary Boast Obscurity Censure Severity

Book:The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752

Source: The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752

“In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.”

“Men who can, when they wish to write a document, shut themselves up for days with their thoughts and their books, know little of what difficulties a woman must surmount to get off a tolerable production.”

Knows Men Writing Littles Book Wish Difficulty Productions Documents Tolerable

Book:Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences

Source: Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences

“Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.”

Writing Goal Subjects Difficulty Wasting Time Petty

Author:Joyce Carol Oates

“The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.”

Knows Writing Bits Novel Creation Difficulty Selection Novel Writing

Book:Letters to a Friend

Source: Letters to a Friend

“I have a very hyper-sensitive sister, and when she saw in the papers the next day that I had proclaimed myself the daughter of an immigrant, she didn't like it at all, and was with difficulty deterred from writing to the press that my father might be an immigrant, but not hers.”

Writing Might Next Father Saws Paper Daughter Difficulty Presses Sensitive Immigrants Next Day Papers Hyper

Author:Margaret Case Harriman

“I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.”

Thinking Way Writing Hard Problem Difficulty Happy Endings Reviewers

Author:Jamaica Kincaid

“When in many dissections, carried out as opportunity offered upon living animals, I first addressed my mind to seeing how I could discover the function and offices of the heart's movement in animals through the use of my own eyes instead of through the books and writings of others, I kept finding the matter so truly hard and beset with difficulties that I all but thought, with Fracastoro, that the heart's movement had been understood by God alone.”

Writing Mind Firsts Heart Book Matter Hard Use Eye Opportunity My Own Animal Seeing Movement Office Findings Understood Function Difficulty Dissection

Author:William Harvey

“Paradoxically, the most constructive thing women can do is to write, for in the act of writing we deny our muteness and begin to eliminate some of the difficulties that have been put upon us.”

Writing Has Beens Art Artist Women Difficulty Deny Constructive

Author:Dale Spender

“Improve yourself by other men's writings thus attaining effortlessly what they acquired through great difficulty.”

Men Writing Difficulty Improving Yourself

Author:Socrates

“To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.”

Writing May Certain Reading Pleasure Novel Pure Difficulty

Book:Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

“We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.”

People Giving Writing Reason Stories Past Remember Difficult Memories Events Difficulty Reason Why Memorable Abstract Abstraction Thumbs Good Story Past Experiences

Book:Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence

Source: Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence

“Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing. And you start talking yourself out of the bold melody and start wanting to arrange it in another key or something. Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.”

Writing Sometimes Sound Natural Talking Keys Singing Difficulty Harmony Notes Odd Melody Perfectly Natural

Author:Elvis Costello

“It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.”

Writing Book Ideas Purpose Social Pleasure Interesting Moral Messages Solutions Difficulty Sake Things To Do Elegant Exploits Interesting Things Riddle Composing Elegant Solutions

Book:Strong opinions

Source: Strong opinions

“I have difficulty putting words in peoples' mouths. The best dialogue is very, very thin dialogue; you let people improvise and then basically you record what they've improvised and then write it down.”

People Writing Records Mouths Difficulty Dialogue

Author:Steve McQueen

“A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.”

Needs Writing Wells Seems Natural Difficulty Felicity Fluent

Author:Joseph Joubert

“A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . .”

Ifs Knows Men Writing Trying Cases Know How Records Scientist Overcoming Difficulty Genre Awkward Autobiography Monotonous Literary Genre

Book:Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature

Source: Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature

“Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.”

Writing Years Mind Body Age Reading Forget Gone Difficulty Newspapers Infirmity

Author:Thomas Jefferson

“I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace. As a reporter, I was a flop, because I always came back laden not with facts about the case, but with a mind full of the little difficulties and amusements I had encountered in my travels.”

Source: The Letters of E. B. White

“Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.”

Writing Stills Age Novel Written Difficulty Paragraph

Author:Ernest Hemingway

“The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.”

Writing Mean Literature Language Difficulty

Author:Robert Louis Stevenson

“If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.”

Ifs Writing Use Simple Materials Difficulty

Author:James Joyce

“I'm sure other writers have no difficulties writing nice.”

Writing Nice Difficulty

Author:Justine Larbalestier

“I started writing a novel from the monster's point of view. It has its own difficulties but, I'm ashamed to say, it's much easier writing from a psychopath's point of view than from that of their empathetic opposite.”

Writing Views Novel Easier Opposites Difficulty Point Of View Monsters Ashamed Psychopath Empathetic

Author:Justine Larbalestier

“Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.”

Thinking Writing Written Sitting Difficulty Hardest Satisfying

Author:Billy Collins

“I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.”

People Thinking Writing Book Ideas Levels Difficulty Sentences New Ideas

Author:Colson Whitehead

“I've always been more than a little mystified by poets who seem to think talking to people as directly as possible is a bad thing. I mean, I don't want to set up a straw man here: I understand that for many poets - and for me, at times - writing truly means writing in a way that is difficult, simply because the poem is trying to grasp for something elusive. So the difficulty of the poem is just unavoidable, and not in any way artificially imposed. So "as possible" is the key part of the phrase above, I suppose.”

People Thinking Men Way Want Writing Trying Mean Littles Seems Difficult Talking Poet Keys Difficulty Phrases Bad Things Elusive Straws

Author:Matthew Zapruder

“Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.”

Writing Stories Animal Lessons Difficulty Hardest

Author:Bonnie Jo Campbell

“Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.”

Knows Writing Use Courses Strong Information Difficulty Ignorant Urges Outsiders

Author:Paolo Bacigalupi

“I think I'm a very lazy writer and by that I mean that I do not battle, I don't struggle too hard against it. If I have difficulties in the writing, I just go and do other things. I don't feel a compulsion to write.”

Ifs Thinking Feels Writing Mean Hard Struggle Battle Difficulty Lazy Compulsion

Author:Wole Soyinka

“While I am happy to make the occasional foray into educational philosophy - writing, for example, of the difficulty in the contemporary context for a teacher to be 'truthful' - it is more the personal conduct of a life than social institutions that I am concerned to examine.”

Writing Philosophy Social Teacher Example Concerned Difficulty Institutions Educational Contemporary Truthful Occasional Being Truthful Social Institutions

Author:David E. Cooper

“In the United States, if you ask teachers, "Are there children whom we should call 'gifted?'", many if not most will say 'No.' That's the politically correct answer. But if you then ask the teacher to rank order students in terms of how well they paint or write or dance, they'll have little difficulty in doing so.”

Ifs Should Writing Wells Children Littles States Order Asks Term Answers United United States Teacher Students Difficulty Paint Gifted Politically Correct

Author:Howard Gardner

“Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but I came out on the side of light more often than not.”

Writing Strange Difficulty

Author:Maggie Smith

“The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.”

Ifs World Writing Different Ends Sometimes Stories Together Given Ability Conflict Difficulty Accidents

Author:Salman Rushdie

“I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.”

Knows Writing Years Two Ideas Hard Used Three Found Opinion Know How Week New York Months Difficulty Extremes Columns New York Times Columnists Syndicate

Author:Salman Rushdie

“As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.”

Writing Moments Dark Subjects Difficulty Critical Landscape Modernism Illuminating Lucidity

Author:Will Self

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”

Writing Mean Book Literature Wish Reader Difficulty

Book:Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)

Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Source: Coraline

“Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the running to spread the truth among such persons.”

Writing Persons Hands Running Lying Wish Five Ignorance Truth Is Skills Judgment Weapons Overcoming Difficulty Spread Combat Manipulate Select Concealed Keenness

Book:Galileo

Source: Galileo

“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.”

Ifs Writing Trying Book Hours Elements Difficulty Surprise Expecting Element Of Surprise Surprise Attacks

Author:H. G. Wells

“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.”

“I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.”

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Difficulty Quotes