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Bridget Whelan Author of A GOOD CONFESSION Sharing some favourite quotations |
Home*Teaching* Rules for Writers* Favourite Quotations*
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....the road to becoming a writer ...the difficulties along the way
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… the road to becoming a writer
It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. Ernest Hemingway
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson
Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. Anthony Burgess
….and the difficulties along the way
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Red Smith
Easy reading is damn hard writing. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how he feels about dogs. Christopher Hampton
I don’t believe in writers’ block. Plumbers don’t get plumbers’ block. Why should writing be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working?” Philip Pullman
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life. F Scott Fitzgerald
The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember or pretend you remember. Harold Pinter
The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A circus passed the house. Still I feel the red in my mind. Emily Dickinson
I write because I don't know what to think until I read what I say. Flannery O'Connor
Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. Julian Barnes
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart. Maya Angelou
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there would be no concept of humanity. Herman Hesse
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Toni Morrison
Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream. Mark Twain
If I see an ending, I can work backward. Arthur Miller
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. Robert Frost
The harder I try, the luckier I get. Dizzy Gillespie
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. Truman Capote
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words or your reader will be sure to skip them, and in the plainest possible words, or he will certainly misunderstand them. John Ruskin
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
F Scott Fitzgerald
When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split. Raymond Chandler
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Found a good quotation about writing? e-mail me on bridget@bridgetwhelan.co.uk