#writers

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to become a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#education #hurt #writers-on-writing #art

All writers are insane! ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#insanity #writers #humor

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#writers #humor

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#quality #skill #writers #writing #imagination

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#characters #ideas #imagination #readers #writers

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so ↗

— Gertrude Atherton

#critics #imagination #writers #imagination

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it. ↗

— Stephen Sondheim

#drowned #generally #get #language #lyric

I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country. ↗

— John Philip Sousa

#band #band leader #believe #compositions #country

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it. ↗

— Josephine Tey

#change

I do remember actually learning chords to Beatles songs. I thought they were great songwriters. ↗

— Mick Taylor

#beatles #beatles songs #chords #great #i