Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
Judge of thine improvement, not by what thou speakest or writest, but by the firmness of thy mind, and the government of thy passions and affections.
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.
Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.