Roger Angle > Roger's Quotes

“The public will buy a certain amount of poetry if you give them their striptease.” -- Ezra Pound”
― Ezra Pound

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
― Robert Benchley

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
― — Chuck Close

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”
― Robert Benchley

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
― E.F. Schumacher

“The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. ”
― William Faulkner

“I found a way of writing where every word was as dangerous as a stick of dynamite.” – William Faulkner”
― William Faulkner

“Now and then you meet a man that ain’t ever been afraid, not even of himself.”
–William Faulkner”
― William Faulkner

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” Excerpt from Nobel Prize acceptance speech”
― Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing

“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.”
― ERNEST HEMINGWAY Nobel Prize acceptance speech 1954

“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

“The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.”
― Mickey Spillane

“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.”
― Grace Paley

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

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”
― Philip Roth

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment. ”
― Robert Benchley

“Be courageous and try to write in a way that scares you a little.”
― Holley Gerth

“Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water; it spreads through and colors everything.”
― Lisa Cron

“You don’t do this to be famous or to have money. If you’re going to write, you do it for you. It’s a compulsion. When I don’t write, I get itchy. The stories are like something under my skin.”
― Jodi Picoult

“Perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want.”
― Bob Dylan

“Whatever one man does, it is as though all men did it.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“All around him, life carried on as usual on the American side of the river. The region was already seven years into the drug war, and it had all taken on a surreal normality. A block away from where he’d parked his squad car, people went about their shopping in the downtown stores, while Mexicans—some of them innocent bystanders—died in the city across the river.”
― Melissa del Bosque, Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty

“Those who felt no remorse after the slaughter were enlisted to be Miguel’s personal bodyguards or soldiers for the front line. They accepted that their lives would be brief and violent. It was a pact made with the devil for money and to feel, for once, what it was like to have power.”
― Melissa del Bosque, Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty