K > K's Quotes

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“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 truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“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

“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called. 
”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks