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 on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.
~Hart Crane
Let me walk through the fields of papertouching with my wanddry stems and stunted butterflies....
~Denise Levertov, "A Walk through the Notebooks"
When you are describing,A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
~Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)
I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.
~Jack Smith
There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.
~Miguel de Cervantes
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851
Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958
2 comments:
very cool.
Well Thank you for visiting
vacuum excavator, drop by more often, I could use a little vacuuming in these parts. :-)
Joni
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