Cortnie's quotes

(showing 1-38 of 38)

"Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: inspirational
105 people liked it

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

tags: writing
16 people liked it

"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little. "
— Anne Lamott

tags: on, writing
4 people liked it

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

tags: inspirational, stories, writing
2,628 people liked it

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: books, children, difficult, grown-ups, write, writers, writing
2,986 people liked it

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: good, writing
1,877 people liked it

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
— Mark Twain

tags: humor, writing
1,524 people liked it

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison

tags: books, writing
1,101 people liked it

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)

tags: writing
910 people liked it

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King

tags: reading, writing
922 people liked it

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

tags: reading, writing
538 people liked it

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

tags: writing
475 people liked it

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

tags: writing
460 people liked it

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: anais, nin, qoutes, writing
579 people liked it

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

tags: criticism, humor, writing
346 people liked it

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman

tags: writing
319 people liked it

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

tags: reading, writing
141 people liked it

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James A. Michener

tags: writing
172 people liked it

"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

tags: fantasy, fiction, tolkien, writing
160 people liked it

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
— Albert Camus

tags: civilization, writers, writing
147 people liked it

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: writing
175 people liked it

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
— Socrates

tags: inspiration, truth, wisdom
520 people liked it

"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self."
— Aldous Huxley

tags: self-improvement
34 people liked it

"When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”"
— Virginia Woolf

tags: bookworms, heavenly, judgment, reading, rewards
141 people liked it

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

tags: books, reading
187 people liked it

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
— Neil Gaiman

tags: writing
188 people liked it

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898"
— Mark Twain

tags: austen, criticism, jerk, reading, writing
250 people liked it

"You can make anything by writing."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: writing
152 people liked it

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

110 people liked it

"I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time."
— Diane Setterfield

41 people liked it

"By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of this books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry..."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians)

tags: caffeine, reading, writing
74 people liked it

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Politics and the English Language, 1946"
— George Orwell

tags: writing
60 people liked it

"Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."
— Stephen King

tags: on-writing
55 people liked it

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

tags: inspirational, life, writing
57 people liked it

"...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing."
— Markus Zusak

tags: writing
49 people liked it

"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."
— Edgar Allan Poe

50 people liked it

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."
— Barbara Kingsolver

40 people liked it

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
— Vladimir Nabokov

tags: writing
41 people liked it

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