#writ

Please don't entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished writing. Read what the great ones have said about their jobs; how they never sit down to their work without a sigh of distress and never get up from it witout a sigh of relief. Do you imagine that your Muse is forever flamelike -- breathing the inspired word, the wonderful situation, the superb solution into your attentive ear? ... Believe me, my poor boy, if you wait for inspiration in our set-up, you'll wait for ever. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#inspiration #writing #death

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fathers #mortality #sons #writers #death

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. ↗

— Robert Lowell

#die #dull #gruesome #history #life

If I could just capture each memory in a bottle the maybe you people would understand how much I've suffered, how much I've been through, but most importantly how far I have come. ↗

— Tommy Tran

#hardships #inspirational #memory #suffering #tommy-tran

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life. ↗

— Ernst Pawel

#kafka #life #writers #writing #death

Ideally, love is unconditional; practically, it is more often the opposite. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#blogger #inspirational #motivational #quotes #t-f-hodge

Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see. ↗

— Henry Fielding

#fame #posterity #writing #death

It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write. ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#dying #writer #writers #writing #death

What does the absolutely final deadline apply to? What book?" If there was one book that did not cry out for a sequel, it was "Death of a Doge". "Don't you remember what an awful time you had writing that book? ↗

— Martha Grimes

#death

Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. ↗

— Helen Keller

#design