Kitty > Kitty's Quotes

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“A Word is Dead

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
― Emily Dickinson

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
― W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948

“Oh phosphorescence. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to... To find that phosphorescence, that light within — is the genius behind poetry.”
― William Luce, The Belle of Amherst

“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”
― Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls: A Novel

“She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.”
― Dean Koontz, Lightning

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”
― Henry Ward Beecher

“Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.”
― Pythagoras

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
― Stephen King

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.”
― Stephen King

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
― Mark Twain

“I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.”
― Richard Brautigan

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice.”
― Shannon Hale

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
― Ray Bradbury

“A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
― Raymond Chandler

“The pen is the tongue of the mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”
― Truman Capote