
"Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas" (1980)
1980s, The Second American Revolution (1983)
Variant: In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all.
Source: The Essential Gore Vidal
"Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas" (1980)
1980s, The Second American Revolution (1983)
Variant: In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all.
Source: The Essential Gore Vidal
Henri Peyre, at Yale, as quoted in Graham, Garrett, The Writer's Voice: Conversations with Contemporary Writers (1973), p. 272
“If one is anxious to write about God, one ought to be anxious to write well.”
"The Productions of Time", Time and Tide, Vol. XXII, No. 4 (25 January 1941), pp. 72–73
“It is difficult not to write satire.”
Difficile est saturam non scribere.
I, line 30.
Satires, Satire I
“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
Source: War and Peace
“not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.”
Source: The Last Night of the Earth Poems
“You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.”
“Nothing is more difficult than writing an autobiography.”
The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)
Context: Nothing is more difficult than writing an autobiography. What should be emphasized? Just what is of general interest? It is advisable, above all, to write honestly and dispense with any of the conventional introductory protestations of modesty. For if one is called upon to tell about one's life so as to make the events that made it what it became useful to the general public, it can mean only that one must have already wrought something positive in life, accomplished a task that people recognize. Accordingly it is a matter of forgetting that one is writing about oneself, of making an effort to abjure one's ego so as to give an account, as objectively as possible, of one's life in the making and of one's accomplishments.
“When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.”
Source: What Happens in London
“If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.”
Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 12, Writing About Yourself: The Memoir, p. 98.