This manuscript of yours that has just
come back from another editor is a precious package.
Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed
it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it
has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'.
Barbara Kingsolver |
There's so much comedy on television.
Does that cause comedy in the streets?
Dick Cavett |
If somebody's trying to shut you up,
sing louder and, if possible, better.
Salman Rushdie |
Sometimes I feel discriminated against,
but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes
me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my
company? It's beyond me.
Zora Neale Hurston |
Women do not always have to write about
women, or gay men about gay men. Indeed, something good
and new might happen if they did not.
Kathryn Hughes |
I never think at all when I write. Nobody
can do two things at the same time and do them both
well.
Don Marquis |
I write for myself and strangers. The
strangers, dear readers, are an after-thought.
Gertrude Stein |
I am the kind of writer that people think
other people are reading.
V. S. Naipaul |
The free-lance writer is a man who is
paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley |
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.
Jorge Luis Borges |
It is one of the paradoxes of American
literature that our writers are forever looking back
with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait
to leave.
Anatole Broyard |
Literature always anticipates life. It
does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The
nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention
of Balzac.
Oscar Wilde |
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a
play.
John Steinbeck |
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing
sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams |
A blank piece of paper is God's way of
telling us how hard it to be God.
Sidney Sheldon |
I have written - often several times
- every word I have ever published.
Vladimir Nabokov |
We don't want the television script good.
We want it Tuesday.
Dennis Norden |
It took me fifteen years to discover
that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give
it up because by that time I was too famous."
Robert Benchley. |
No passion in the world is equal to the
passion to alter someone else's draft.
H. G. Wells |
When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe |
You must write for children in the same
way as you do for adults, only better.
Maxim Gorky |
His
father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and,
after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off
and forgot him. It was the perfect start in life for
a writer.
Anatole Broyard |
I
can't write five words but that I change seven.
Dorothy Parker |
I
don't think any good book is based on factual experience.
Bad books are about things the writer already knew before
he wrote them.
Carlos Fuentes |
Originality
is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original
writers borrowed one from another.
Voltaire |
It's
none of their business that you have to learn to write.
Let them think you were born that way.
Ernest Hemingway |
There
is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.
Maya Angelou |
This
manuscript of yours that has just come back from another
editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected.
Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who
can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back
stamped 'Not at this address'.
Barbara Kingsolver |
A
blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how
hard it to be God.
Sidney Sheldon |
You
know how it is in the kid's book world; it's just bunny
eat bunny.
Anonymous |
If
I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.
Lord Byron |
The
public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything
except genius.
Oscar Wilde |
Man
invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin |
Nature
fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can't write, can surely review.
James Russell Lowell |
Oh,
let a man of spirit venture where he pleases
And never tip his golden cup empty towards the moon!
Since heaven gave the talent, let it be employed!
Li Po |
What
would I do if I had only six months left to live? I'd
type faster.
Isaac Asimov |
When
talent fails, indignation writes the verse.
Juvenal |
It
is only because the world looks on his talent with such
a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled
to make his talent important.
James Baldwin |
When
disaster causes the familiar ground to shudder beneath
the feet of a child, a neurotic is sometimes born, or
a writer, and often both.
Time Magazine |
A
professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
Richard Bach |
Be
born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be
born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the
burden of original sin, not under the doom of salvation.
Pearl Buck |
