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All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
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The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary.
You know I didn't think they'd rake through my bins, I didn't expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses. I never dreamt it would impact my daughter's life negatively, which at times it has.
J. K. Rowling
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Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges.
George Orwell
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Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
William Faulkner
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A writer's temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry There! and it is gone forever. Planets and wandering stars last a much longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars... only because they are near. It is not long before they must yield their place.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it.
Lewis Carroll
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Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
Ernest Hemingway
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Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
Ernest Hemingway
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I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.
Ray Bradbury
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Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
Umberto Eco
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Artisans, bureaucrats, that's what we writers are! The joys of creation! Novels dashed off in ecstasy in three weeks! Nonsense! Three thousand pages botched and wasted in order to produce two hundred and fifty polished ones.
Colette
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Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.
Malcolm X
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Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else.
Ernest Hemingway
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Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write.
Epictetus
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There is something in this universe that justifies the biblical writer in saying, "You shall reap what you sow." This is a law-abiding universe. This is a moral universe. It hinges on moral foundations. If we are to make of this a better world, we've got to go back and rediscover that precious value that we've left behind.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.
John F. Kennedy
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Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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