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Quotes about writing

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You should never pick up a newspaper when you’re feeling good, because every newspaper has a special department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up depressing front-page stories with headlines like DOORBELL USE LINKED TO LEUKEMIA and OZONE LAYER COMPLETELY GONE DIRECTLY OVER YOUR HOUSE.
Dave Barryborn 1947
- Dave Barry
- Journalism
On the Japanese news, if the announcers had happy faces and perky voices, I knew that meant good news, such as that Japanese scientists had discovered a way to make VCR’s even more difficult for Americans to program; whereas if the announcers had serious voices and frowny faces, it meant bad news, such as the worsening eel shortage.
Dave Barryborn 1947
- Dave Barry
- Journalism
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.
Dave Barryborn 1947
- Dave Barry
- Journalism
There is in the word, in the logos, something sacred which forbids us to gamble with it. To handle a language skilfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire1821–1867XIV: “Théophile Gautier” , as translated in The Idea of Poetry in France: From Houdar de La Motte to Baudelaire (1958) by Margaret Gilman, p. 263
When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children.
L. Frank Baum1856–1919Personal inscription on a copy of Mother Goose in Prose (1897) which he gave to his sister, Mary Louise Baum Brewster, as quoted in The Making of the Wizard of Oz (1998) by Aljean Harmetz, p. 317
- Age
I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.’
Saul Bellow1915–2005
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
Saul Bellow1915–2005
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow1915–2005Nobel Prize lecture (12 December 1976)
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Walter Benjamin1892–1940“The Storyteller” (1936)
- Wisdom
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
Aneurin Bevan1897–1960Interview in The Times (29 March 1960), p. 7
- Clever Jabs
- Journalism
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
Karen Blixen1885–1962Interview with Bent Mohn in The New York Times Book Review (3 November 1957)
Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you’re writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader’s imagination will reject it.
Jorge Luis Borges1899–1986Discussion published in the Columbia Forum and later quoted in Worldwide Laws of Life: 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles (1998) by John Templeton
Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
Jorge Luis Borges1899–1986“Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote” (January 1955)
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Jorge Luis Borges1899–1986“The Flower of Coleridge” (“La flor de Coleridge”), Other Inquisitions (1952)
Given a choice between being trapped on a desert island with a group of writers or a family of howler monkeys, I think I’d pick the monkeys. At least I could eat them.
Anthony Bourdain1956–2018The Nasty Bits (2006)
- Comedy