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On Writing... (#1) - compiled by Sue Ledger


Start writing a new chapter, for if you live by the book you'll never make history. - Ben Sobel

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing. - Benjamin Disraeli

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. - Booker Taliaferro Washington

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. - Brenda Ueland

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior. - Christina Baldwin

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you. - Cyril Connolly

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.
- Delmore Schwartz

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous constant. - Edna Ferber

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. - Catherine Drinker Bowen

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. But amusing? Never. - Edna Ferber

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