Quotes about writ
writing men dragons
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb. W. H. Auden
writing men taught
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
writing night people
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
writing winning doe
How happy is the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.
writing chance lifetime
The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
writing intelligent doe
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
writing important age
It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940.
writing hands want
For me they go hand in hand. When I travel it makes me want to write, when I read it makes me want to travel. William Dalrymple
writing thinking
He who writes badly thinks badly William Cobbett
writing views tyrants
All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers . If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants.
writing thinking
Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.
writing self long
But poverty, with most who whimper forth Their long complaints, is self-inflicted woe; The effect of laziness, or sottish write. William Cowper
writing purpose ends
When I go to a music concert, I don't say, "My purpose is to get to the end and enjoy the finale." If that were the purpose, everybody would write finales and nothing more. The purpose of the concert is to enjoy each note as you go along. Wayne Dyer
writing expression
Writing isn't something I do, writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.
writing important needs
I need to write down my observations. Even the tiniest ones; they're the most important. Tove Jansson
writing long paper
The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper. Ursula K. Le Guin
writing mean kids
In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.
writing thinking way
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
writing stories plot
The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
writing thinking names
I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
writing down-and
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
writing giving mind
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
writing noise done
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
writing hard-work waiting
All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
writing library stories
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
writing class focus
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
writing doors fiction
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
writing trying showing-up
I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
writing practice voice
What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
writing fiction preacher
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
writing soul share
The great authors share their souls with us- "literally.
writing thinking self
I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
writing technology fiction
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.