writing
“I learned that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time.”
“The imagination needs moodling,—long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”
“By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.”
“Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.”
“The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim.”
“One of the satisfactions of fiction is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life.”
“Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does.”
“Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself.”
“Words are the small change of thought.”
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
“The business of writing demands two—the author and the reader.”
“Clarity is courtesy to the reader.”
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
“Style is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament.”
“I hate writing, I love having written.”
“What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.”
“Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”
“To err is human; to forgive, divine.”
“Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”
“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”