“Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.”
Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 15 (p. 179)
“Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and tortuous to write a bad one.”
Letter to A.S. Suvorin (May 4, 1889)
Letters
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Do you have more details about the quote "Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twi…" by Anton Chekhov?
Anton Chekhov 222
Russian dramatist, author and physician 1860–1904Related quotes
Brian W. Kernighan
(1942) Canadian computer scientist
" The Elements of Programming Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_Style", 2nd edition, chapter 2.
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
Also attributed to Ernest Hemingway and others; the earliest definite occurrence of this yet found in research for Wikiquote is by Maya Angelou, who stated it in Conversations With Maya Angelou (1989) edited by Jeffrey M. Elliot:
I think it's Alexander Pope who says, "Easy writing is damn hard reading," and vice versa, easy reading is damn hard writing
The statement she referred to is most probably:
You write with ease, to show your breeding,
But easy writing's curst hard reading
Clio's Protest, or the Picture Varnished (written 1771, published 1819) by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Disputed
“Writing is easy. It's just the typing that's hard.”
Nicholas Sparks
(1965) American writer and novelist
Miles Sparks, Prologue, p. 3
2000s, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004)
“Easy writing makes hard reading.”
Ernest Hemingway
(1899–1961) American author and journalist
As quoted in Paris Was Our Mistress (1947) by Samuel Putnam, p. 128
“You write with ease to show your breeding,
But easy writing's curst hard reading.”
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
(1751–1816) Irish-British politician, playwright and writer
Clio's Protest (1819).
William Zinsser
(1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor
Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 2, Simplicity, p. 12.
“Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.”
Jimi Hendrix
(1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter
As quoted in Crosstown Traffic (1989) by Charles Shaar Murray