All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. […] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.”

“The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: “Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.”

“Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.”

“For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn’t tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. …It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can’t give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can’t help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.”

“Sculptors feel that somebody else is using their hands, that they couldn’t possibly be doing this.”

“All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful… If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There’s a constant balance between those two.”

“OK booze, let’s make a deal, God will be my witness, I’ll keep you at 4 % and below, and you make me famous.”

“Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told. It’s in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can’t trust anything they haven’t seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

“…at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.”

“I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.”

“A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.”

“To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)”

“Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?”

“The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.”

“When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn’t otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.”