All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“It’s wonderful to look back at our old writing and cringe. It simply means we have grown and can write better now. And you found some parts you can be proud of, so when you throw the old writing on the floor and stomp on it, remember to celebrate those seeds of genius and be glad that you’re still writing.”

“The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this–whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”

“Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.”

“There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it’s why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.”

“When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”

“I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.”

“In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.”

“The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. ”

“All writers–all beings–are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force…All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..”

“Sesungguhnya, penulis yang bersemangat jauh lebih menjanjikan daripada penulis yang berbakat.”

“He found solace in what he wrote. It was an attempt to discover who he was at the moment.”

“Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example…”

“A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”