Verbatim





Who better than the quotable Snoopy to lead off a page of quotable quotes by authors of esteem.

Enjoy the wisdom to be found in these verbatims.




Margaret Atwood: The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies.

Raymond Chandler: When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

Anton Chekhov: Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.


George Darien:  A writer's eyes, to be clear, must be dry.

Lexi Davis:  Never follow trends! Readers will remember innovators, not imitators.


Bernard De Voto.  Novelists, whatever else they may be besides, are also 

children talking to children––in the dark.

Albert Einstein.  Imagination is more important than knowledge.


T. S. Eliot.  Yes, I supposed that some editors are failed writers––but so are most writers.

William Faulkner.  A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.


Gustave Flaubert. What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to

row in.

Robert Frost: A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.


Paul Graham: The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

David Halberstam: Our personal journeys mark us.

Christopher Hampton: Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

Ernest Hemingway: I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-

nine times before I was satisfied.
- The first draft of anything is shit.
- Write drunk. Edit sober.

Horace: The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Shel Horowitz. Successful people have big libraries. So read to succeed.


James Joyce: A writer should never write about the extraordinary. That is 
for the journalist.

Stephen King: I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. 

You can't sell it as caviar.

Ring Lardner: How can you write if you can't cry?

Anne Morrow Lindbergh: When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others, too.

Alice Munro: The constant happiness is curiosity.


Iris Murdoch. Art is about the pilgrimage from appearance to reality.

Vladimir Nabokov. Caress the detail, the divine detail.

Blaise Pascal. The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.


Sylvia Plath. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Ezra Pound. You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem.

John Ruskin. Be sure you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

George Bernard Shaw. Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.

Wallace Stevens: Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and 
death.

Isaac Bashevis Singer: When a writer becomes the center of his attention, he has become a nudnick,
and a nudnick who believes he is profound is worse than just a plain nudnick.


Tom Stoppard.  The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy 
means.

Henry David Thoreau.  How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

E. B. White.  Writers really take their worst shellacking from other writers.


Oscar Wilde.  Poetry is idealized grammar.


Bev Walton-Porter.  Rejection is not the end for any writer; it is actually a wonderful opportunity and an invitation to work toward improving your existing skills.



Frank Lloyd Wright. I think the worst thing that can happen is to publish
your work prematurely.
- We hunger for POETRY naturally as we do for sunlight, fresh air, 
and fruits, if we are normal human beings.

William Zinsser: Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even
Tom Wolfe.

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