Writing Aphorisms

With the assistance of my wife, I have been redoing my office (painting, new/antique furniture, wall hangings). We were shooting for a Tiki/beach/rustic feel that would also be more functional. In purge and cleaning, I had come across a list I had printed from years ago of writing aphorisms, quotes that are certain to start a conversation.

A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. (Cyril Connolly)

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning to it. (Anais Nin)

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing: it’s about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustrations that it creates. (Mordecai Richler)

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it. (Gabrielle Roy)

Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, a narcissist, an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity. (Edmund Bergler)

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. (Karl Kraus)

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing — for life itself is a writer’s love until death. (Edna Ferber)

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking. (Laurence Clark Powell)

The poet is the priest of the invisible. (Wallace Stevens)

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. (Christopher Morley)

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry. (William Butler Yeats)