Marcy > Marcy's Quotes

“For me, writing was the only way out.”
― Anne Tyler, The Writer on Her Work

“The most clear-sided view of the darkest
possible situation is itself an act of optimism”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.”
― Isabel Allende

“Writing is a little bit like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for a few friends. Then you do it for money.”
― Molière

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.”
― Doris Lessing،مهدی غبرائی, The Golden Notebook

“It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.”
― Doris Lessing

“Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
― Doris Lessing

“Writin’ Is Fightin'!”
― Ismael Reed

“Writing is like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.”
― Phillip Roth

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
― Dorothy Parker

“...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.”
― John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“You have to understand, having a good time is not my idea of having a good time.”
― Anonymous

“Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”
― Doris Lessing

“If your career doesn’t work out, write a book about it.”
― Marcy Sheiner

“Behind every erotic condemnation there's a burning hypocrite.”
― Susie Bright

“This is not a meritocracy.”
― Sallie Tisdale, Talk Dirty to Me

“I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There's some hollowness if they don't.”
― Philip Hensher

“It is the discrepancy between the promise implicit in his touch and his daily interactions with her that generates so much confusion and ambivalence for Martha.--from Lo Siento”
― Marcy Sheiner, Love and Other Illusions: Short Stories

“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“You can "listen to your heart" as long as you remember that it has an I.Q. of zero.”
― Ken Doggett

“A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome." John Steinback”
― Ken Doggett

“Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or "way," an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious—a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand—and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.--John Gardner”
― Marcy Sheiner

“What rubbish anyway, he thought with scorn, an all-powerful god that was everywhere at once yet nowhere to be seen. These grunts believe anything, he thought with distaste.”
― Howard Loring

“Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."

(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)”
― Salman Rushdie