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Writing Quotes

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Writing Quotes

“To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.”

“My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing.... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.”

People Writing Wells Enough Facts Faces Difficult Talking Ambition Block Mysterious Prescriptions Hysteria Writer's Block Writing Well

Author:Thomas Mallon

“I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.”

Feels Writing Trying Character Stories Eye Faces Term Expression Mouths Noses Theme Plot Discussing Story Writing

Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.”

Writing Faces Novel Inevitable Spit Obsolescence

Author:John Green

“When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.”

Writing Looks Faces Moving Laughing Cry Fool

Author:Zoe Kazan

“[Her] love and tenderness ... gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.”

Love Writing Play Lasts Faces Understanding Four Pity Tenderness Romantic Love Sweet Love Faith In Love

Author:Eugene O'Neill

“There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.”

Should Writing Different Problem Faces Young Courses Creative Generations Taught Solve Creative Writing Seminars Previous Generations

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar - that I call an achievement.”

People Writing Believe Art Book Done Whole Faces Achievement Liars Sensible Sane Great Art Solemn Brevity

Author:Georg C. Lichtenberg

“I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another.”

People Men Writing May Book Ideas Faces Literature Known Vision Genius Advertising Prophecy Face To Face Writing A Book Living On Unborn

Book:The House of Twenty Seven Gardens

Source: The House of Twenty Seven Gardens

“I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”

Thinking Men Writing Matter Faces Written Land Definitions Suspects Pens Strokes Signatures Chopping

Book:A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There

Source: A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There