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The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
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Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
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The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
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Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
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It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
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To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.
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If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
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No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
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A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
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A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
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Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
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Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
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To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience.
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On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
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All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
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The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
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It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous.
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The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not.
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Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
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Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
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A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
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To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
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No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.
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He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write.
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Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
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Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
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A book should be luminous not voluminous.
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Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.
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For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
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Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
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But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.
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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
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The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
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Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
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Writers are the main landmarks of the past.
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The pen is mightier than the sword.
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Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.
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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
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The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
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Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; -- all this comes of Authorship.
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To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
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In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.
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If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
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The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
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I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
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An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.
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There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
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Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
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The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
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Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.
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Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
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Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.
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The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
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If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!
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To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
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The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.
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Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.
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A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
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The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
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When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.
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In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
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Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.
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If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
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There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.
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Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
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To write is a humiliation.
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What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.
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Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
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I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.
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The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
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