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Famous Writers Quotes

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Famous Writers Quotes

“Who are you? She asked silently, as she laid away the collector's quotations, his drawings, his scraps of famous poetry: "Come live with me and be my love..." interleaved with menus: 'oysters, fish stew, tortoise in its shell, bread from the oven, honey from the honeycomb.' The books were unsplattered but much fingered, their pages soft with turning and re-turning, like collections of old fairy tales. Often Jess thought of Rapunzel and golden apples and enchanted gardens. She thought of Ovid, and Dante, and Cervantes, and the Pre-Raphaelites, for sometimes McClintock pictured his beloved eating, and sometimes sleeping in fields of poppies, and once throned like Persephone, with strawberry vines entwined in her long hair.”

“The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.”

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

“It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.”

“I know of only one country, at least to my knowledge, which has a dissident culture where leading figures, I mean, the most famous writers, journalists, academics and so on, are not only critical of state policy, but are constantly carrying out civil disobedience and risking imprisonment and often being imprisoned, standing up for people's rights. That's Turkey.”

“If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.”

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

“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.”

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.”

“I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.”

“Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.”

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.”

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”