Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16
“In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.”
Goethe (1828).
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
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Thomas Carlyle 481
Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian… 1795–1881Related quotes
“Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”
Mary McCarthy
(1912–1989) American writer
Comment about Lillian Hellman in a televised interview (1979) on The Dick Cavett Show; this prompted a defamation suit against McCarthy which was dropped after Hellman's death: "If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on. I didn't want her to die. I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that."
Madeleine L'Engle
(1918–2007) American writer
Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.
“A man must pretend not to be a writer.”
William Saroyan
(1908–1981) American writer
Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)
Ted Hughes
(1930–1998) English poet and children's writer
The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.
“Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.”
Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Source: Reviews