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Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor
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What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?
Julio Cortázar
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Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard
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For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.
John Boyle O'Reilly
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There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer – reading is so much a part of it.
Dermot Healy
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Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
Rod Serling
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It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers, — it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small. Let us believe it, then, once for all, that there is no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers that know their powers.
Herman Melville
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When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.
Willie Morris
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion
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I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
Carlos Fuentes
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Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
Edna O'Brien
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There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.
L. Sprague de Camp
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Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Eudora Welty
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Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.
Edward Dahlberg
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But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
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It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
Anatole Broyard
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann
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I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
Anne Lamott
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If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
Mickey Spillane
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Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
Edward Albee
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This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius. For this I should like to express my most ardent and most sincere gratitude as a Pole to you gentlemen, the members of the Swedish Academy, and I conclude by borrowing the words of Horace: "To have earned the goodwill of the great is not the least of merits."
Henryk Sienkiewicz
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When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.
Alfred Kazin
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Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W. H. Auden
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When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.
Carl Van Vechten
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Quote of the day
It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness.
George Borrow
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