Quotations About Writing
"It's so silly in life not to pursue the highest possible thing you can imagine, even if you run the risk of losing it all, because if you don't pursue it, you've lost it anyway. You can't be an artist and be safe."
-- Francis Ford Coppola
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."
-- Elmore Leonard
"The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into new land."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Write something worth reading or do something worth writing about!"
-- Source unknown (a good quotation to put near your computer)
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
-- Gore Vidal, writer (1925- )
"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"...tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and... its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlookers' brightest opinions of the human animal. For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.."
-- Arthur Miller, "No More Masterpieces," Modern Drama, ed. Anthony Caputi, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1966
"And for aspiring writers, I would say that once you have identified the fact that you have the desire or talent, you are obligated to pursue it not as a talent but as a means to bless someone else."
-- Patricia Haley
To be continued...