Writing Quotes - Page 1052

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.

Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.

As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.

They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.

You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.

Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.

The table I write on I say exists ... meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.

All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.

I began conducting when I was in school, around age 12, because I was writing little theater pieces and wanted to perform them. And then somehow I got started on it. I love doing it, but I have to ration myself very severely or I wouldn't get anything else done.

When I lose direction, it becomes very hard to write. I actually get a physical pain, as if my subconscious knows better. That may sound mystical and pretentious, but it's true.

A traveler amid the scenery of the Alps, surrounded by the sublimest demonstration of God's power, had the hardihood to write against his name, in an album kept for visitors, "An atheist." Another who followed, shocked and indignant at the inscription, wrote beneath it, If an atheist, a fool; if not, a liar!

What rare days were those, When my chief duty was to write a song.

Mark Twain said (particularly about Pink Marsh): "I have been reading him again, and my admiration overflows all limits. ... How effortless the limning! It is as if the work did itself, without help of the master's hand."

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.

It would be very hard to write a serious drama and say some of these things. You can be much more abstract and allusive with horror, and it's very forgiving to the author. You don't necessarily have to take an absolutely positive position. You can just write whatever.

What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years.