Writing
Quotes
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If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Death in the Afternoon
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don�t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays
Essays