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Quotes about writers and writing
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You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two. (Combs Jeffrey)
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action. (Combs Jeffrey)
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains. (Combs Jeffrey)
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I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail. (Combs Jeffrey)
Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries. (Combs Jeffrey)
A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. (Combs Jeffrey)
Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem. (Combs Jeffrey)
I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others. (Combs Jeffrey)
All the world knows me in my book, and may book in me. (Combs Jeffrey)
Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill. (Combs Jeffrey)
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt. (Combs Jeffrey)
The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned. (Combs Jeffrey)
To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind. (Combs Jeffrey)
Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. (Combs Jeffrey)
A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles. (Combs Jeffrey)
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. (Combs Jeffrey)
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, 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. (Combs Jeffrey)
For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity. (Combs Jeffrey)
He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer. (Combs Jeffrey)
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society. (Combs Jeffrey)
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living. (Combs Jeffrey)
Most authors steal their works, or buy. (Combs Jeffrey)
Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss. (Combs Jeffrey)
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