The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

Jacques Barzun
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  2. Writing doesn’t get any easier with time or talent. If writing is easy for you, you’re probably still learning the craft. You haven’t perfected your style or landed upon your “voice.” You haven’t learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it... - Darynda Jones
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More Quotes By Jacques Barzun
  1. Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
  2. Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
  3. Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.
  4. Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
  5. What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.
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