All Quotes By Tag: Writers

“Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.(“Literature, Revolution, and Entropy”)”

“Writers give readers courage – the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self.(In reference to Audre Lorde)”

“Persistence can look a lot like stupid.”

“It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.”

“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”

“J’ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d’écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible.”(“I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.”)[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]”

“And so I just kept writing to myself.”

“I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist’s first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.”

“In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn’t fill him with the same enthusiasm”

“You cannot write unless you write much.”

“Just because we’re fictional characters doesn’t mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.–the people of Lake Woebegon”

“If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.”

“I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.”

“The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.”

“What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write… Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn’t write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.”