Putting Fingers to Keyboard

What I intended to do when I started this was to create a post made entirely of quotes from other people. Like many of my fantastically great ideas it didn't work out so well. Instead, I just gathered together a number of quotes about writing. Often, what I intend to do gets pushed aside by what happens. My comments are in italics.

"I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties." [1]

No great mystery in that concept.

"I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I've never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don't think that there are takebacks. I don't feel right about it." [2]

Odd... I have never deleted any posts... yet

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." [3]

After I have written something, I always find someone who has said it better.

"Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage." [4]

The four basic 'food groups' of screenplays

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." [5]

Why is it always 'either/or'?

"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?" [6]

So that is why I get nowhere much of the time!

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." [7]

Me too... so why do I get so few answers?

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again." [8]

Exactly why I hate to proofread my work.

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." [9]

I would do that but the voices in my head threaten to strike me out.

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule." [10]

What's another word for 'thesaurus'?


[1] Agatha Christie
[2] Alison Headley
[3] C. S. Lewis
[4] Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
[5] Cyril Connolly
[6] George Orwell
[7] Joan Didion
[8] Oscar Wilde
[9] Samuel Johnson
[10] Stephen King


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