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Quotes about writers and writing
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The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name. (Combs Jeffrey)
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal. (Combs Jeffrey)
It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane. (Combs Jeffrey)
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To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do. (Combs Jeffrey)
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. (Combs Jeffrey)
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted. (Combs Jeffrey)
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders. (Combs Jeffrey)
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him. (Combs Jeffrey)
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent. (Combs Jeffrey)
To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience. (Combs Jeffrey)
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox. (Combs Jeffrey)
The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. (Combs Jeffrey)
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon. (Combs Jeffrey)
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. (Combs Jeffrey)
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion. (Combs Jeffrey)
A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it. (Combs Jeffrey)
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence. (Combs Jeffrey)
No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write. (Combs Jeffrey)
He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write. (Combs Jeffrey)
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned. (Combs Jeffrey)
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. (Combs Jeffrey)
A book should be luminous not voluminous. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them. (Combs Jeffrey)
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