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Writing Quotes

“Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into any bookstore or library, calculate how many lifetimes the average person would need to read all the fiction contained therein. To think that one has anything to contribute, to any genre or tradition, takes genuine hubris.”

Thinking Needs Writing Persons Self Would Be Walks Fiction Ignorance Equal Tradition Tasks Lifetime Library Average Genuine Genre Novelists Arrogance Bookstores Average Person Hubris

Author:Laura Lippman

“It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.”

Ifs Want Should Writing Years Long Book Real Ends Wanted Dies Novel Impossible Goes On Tradition Tragedy Wounds Real Life Scar Conventional Happy Endings Old Wounds

Author:Willa Cather

“The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

Men Writing Country Whole Feelings Order Literature Existence Generations Tradition Historical Bones Simultaneous Individual Talent

Book:The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays

Source: The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays

“Suppose there arise a dispute relative to some important question among us, should we not have recourse to the most ancient Churches with which the apostles held constant intercourse, and learn from them what is certain and clear in regard to the present question? For how should it be if the apostles themselves had not left us writings? Would it not be necessary, in that case, to follow the course of the tradition which they handed down to those to whom they did commit the Churches?”

“We have a tradition of passing our history orally and singing a lot of it and writing songs about it and there's kind of a calling in Irish voices when they're singing in their Irish accent.”

Writing Kind Song Voice Calling Singing Tradition Passing Passings Accents Writing Songs Irish Accent

Author:Sinead O'Connor

“When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.”

Needs Writing Grows Chance Tradition Protection Makers Merry Defiance Seeming Walt Butchers Bakers

Book:The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays

Source: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays

“When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.”

Source: Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History