T. S. Eliot Quotes, Writing Quotes, Agony Quotes

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

5 years ago

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Tags : T. S. Eliot Quotes , Writing Quotes , Agony Quotes

I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

5 years ago

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Tags : Ernest Hemingway Quotes , Hurt Quotes , Writing Quotes

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

5 years ago

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Tags : Khalil Gibran Quotes , Fall Quotes , Writing Quotes

to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

5 years ago

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Heart Quotes

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

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Tags : Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes , Writing Quotes , Law Quotes

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

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Tags : T. S. Eliot Quotes , Writing Quotes , Editing Quotes

I love the song 'I Hope You Dance' by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it.

5 years ago

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Tags : Maya Angelou Quotes , Song Quotes , Writing Quotes

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.

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Tags : Al Alvarez Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Women Quotes , Writing Quotes

If I were a writer and not a singer in 10 years, I don't know how I'd feel about writing really personal songs and getting someone else to sing them.

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Tags : Adele Quotes , Song Quotes , Writing Quotes

No matter where; of comfort no man speak: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth

5 years ago

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Tags : William Shakespeare Quotes , Writing Quotes , Eye Quotes

I'll write records until I'm dead. And then maybe even after that!

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Tags : Alanis Morissette Quotes , Writing Quotes

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.

5 years ago

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Mean Quotes , Writing Quotes

I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.

5 years ago

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Tags : D. H. Lawrence Quotes , Writing Quotes , Plans Quotes

Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.

5 years ago

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Tags : Ernest Hemingway Quotes , Writing Quotes , Age Quotes

I probably write a poem every 50 years.

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Tags : Al Pacino Quotes , Writing Quotes

I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.

5 years ago

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Tags : Achmat Dangor Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life - and one is as good as another.

5 years ago

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Tags : Ernest Hemingway Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing Quotes

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)

5 years ago

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Tags : Ernest Hemingway Quotes , Writing Quotes , Trying Quotes

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.

5 years ago

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Tags : F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes