|
|
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word. (Combs Jeffrey)
Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul. (Combs Jeffrey)
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame. (Combs Jeffrey)
Great writers are the saints for the godless. (Combs Jeffrey)
|
|
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him. (Combs Jeffrey)
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate! (Combs Jeffrey)
It requires more than mere genius to be an author. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writers are the main landmarks of the past. (Combs Jeffrey)
The pen is mightier than the sword. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic. (Combs Jeffrey)
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels. (Combs Jeffrey)
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. (Combs Jeffrey)
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. (Combs Jeffrey)
An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought. (Combs Jeffrey)
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success. (Combs Jeffrey)
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love. (Combs Jeffrey)
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. (Combs Jeffrey)
Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune. (Combs Jeffrey)
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen. (Combs Jeffrey)
To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author. (Combs Jeffrey)
The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down. (Combs Jeffrey)
Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say. (Combs Jeffrey)
|
