Quotes about writ
writing stories checks
It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. Erle Stanley Gardner
writing crowns literature
I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty. Florence King
writing editing waiting
Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill. Flann O'Brien
writing nuts piano
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts. Flannery O'Connor
writing empathy bulls
Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story.
writing thinking quality
I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.
writing talking stories
I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.
writing people use
I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.
writing ideas people
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
writing mind different
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
writing attention use
When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.
writing blood working-together
As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head.
writing self blood
The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.
writing mean people
It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.
writing thinking air
I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.
writing half overcoming
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
writing attachment fiction
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
writing people stories
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
writing able literature
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
writing stupidity quality
There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.
writing deals
Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
writing thinking old-lady
...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.
writing knows
I write to discover what I know.
writing
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
writing thinking trying
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
writing character people
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.
writing rubbish stories
I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
writing self example
Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.
writing three hours
I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.
writing people dying
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
writing southern quality
When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
writing fiction no-excuses
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
writing people long
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.