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A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day
                                    
            Page 180. 
A Grammar of the English Language (1818)
        
                                        
                                        Vol. 1, pp. 4–5 
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day
                                    
                                        
                                        "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
                                    
                                        
                                        track 11, "Three Easy Payments" 
Mitch All Together (2003)
                                    
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
                                        
                                        August 19, 1851 
Journals (1838-1859) 
Variant: How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
                                    
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Variant: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”
Letter to Horace Davenport (3 April 1989).
 
                            
                        
                        
                         
                            
                        
                        
                         
                            
                        
                        
                         
                            
                        
                        
                        