Writing Quotes

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For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Françoise Sagan

People have always said - those words, 'too conservative,' is fairly relative. I'm sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

The apostolic writings are of three kinds: historical, didactic, and prophetic.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

Georges Simenon

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it has also become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it.

Aharon Appelfeld

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

Recipe for writing novels:

Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy... Translation is very much like copying paintings.

Boris Pasternak

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence — a lot passes you by — simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.

What civilians do not understand—and to a writer anyone not a writer is a civilian—is that writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

John Gregory Dunne

If it is indeed impossible — or at least very difficult — to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

We arrived within 11 miles of our old One Ton Camp with fuel for one hot meal and food for two days. For four days we have been unable to leave the tent - the gale howling about us. We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.

Robert Falcon Scott