The first snowfall clinging to a tree***
~Anton Chekhov
"A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes."
~William Sansom
"However great a man's natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once."
~Jean Jacques Rousseau
"A writer is working when he's staring out of the window."
~Burton Rascoe
"The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention."
~Ezra Pound
"You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads….may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
~Ray Bradbury
"The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly…Once you've got some words looking back at you, you can take two or three - throw them away and look for others." ~Bernard Malamud
"In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give to your style."
~Sydney Smith
"…your reader is at least as bright as you are."
~William Maxwell
"…you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists."
~F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I write the first sentence and trust in God for the next."
~Laurence Sterne
2 comments:
That William Maxwell, he's so crazy!
Are you saying I'm not as bright as you?
AM TOO! :P
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