Writing
Quotes
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It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.
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.
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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