I wanted to do it once. Be a writer. Now I'm near 70, and the only thing I have to show for it is dictionary entries. Don't get me wrong -- I'm incredibly proud of it all. But let me say this, and I'll say it just once: don't fool yourself into thinking you're just on a detour as you sail home for Ithaca. A little pit stop, if you like, with the Lotus-Eaters or Calypso. There's no Athena interceding on your behalf. No guarantee you'll eventually arrive. If there's something you really want in life -- especially if it's something that scares you, or you think you don't deserve -- you have to go after it and do it now. Or in not very long you'll be right: you won't deserve it. . Alena Graedon
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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Gustave Flaubert
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.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
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Chuck Palahniuk
In order to write about life first you must live it.
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Ernest Hemingway
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can...
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Stephen Fry
More Quotes By Alena Graedon
Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a...
The secretary of education recently unveiled an initiative for curriculums to place more emphasis on history and language. Within the decade, proficiency in at least three languages will be required of all American schoolchildren by graduation. And along with its other recommendations, the CDC has...
I found that reading gave me a certain relief — one form of escapism that seemed safe, and maybe more than safe. I felt saner — less fragmented- after reading for an hour.location 3234
To create a word is simple. But to create a world — to think — that’s hard.
People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up.
