119 Witty Quotes
From A to Z
Compiled by E. P. Ned Burke
Copyright E. P. Ned Burke 2010-2011
Smashwords Edition License Notes:
This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.
NOTICE:
No content or links in this book can be changed or deleted. However, the original purchaser can duplicate or distribute by e-mail, printout, computer disc or any other means as long as the book remains unchanged in any way. Otherwise, the act would be a violation of international copyright law.
The content in this book is based on the author’s personal research and preference. Many of the quotes are from recognized authors and writers. All quotes are in alphabetical order according to last name.
119 Witty Quotes From A to Z is published as an inspirational and entertaining reference tool, especially for aspiring writers.
.
All content contained herein is compliments of The Perspiring Writer Magazine (www.theperspiringwriter.com) in conjunction with E. P. Burke Publishing.
119 Witty Quotes From A to Z
( Compliments of The Perspiring Writer Magazine)
"I love deadlines. I especially love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
Douglas Adams
**********
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
Howard Aiken
**********
"I've never been an intellectual but I have this look."
Woody Allen
**********
Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.
Jean Anouilh
**********
"If you have the right friends, you don’t need the Internet."
Ken Atchity
**********
"You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer."
Margaret Atwood
**********
"Imagination: Being able to think of things that haven’t appeared on TV yet."
Henry Beard
**********
"What is art but a way of seeing?"
Saul Bellow
*********
"A professional is a man who respects his trade, tries as hard as he can to perfect his work, and realizes that one failure isn’t the end of the world. Or two…or three."
Nathaniel Benchley
**********
"Journalists must seek and speak the truth, for we are the voice of the voiceless millions."
Razia Bhatti
**********
"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."
Jim Bishop
**********
"The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'"
Roy Blount Jr.
**********
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
**********
"In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story."
Ben Bova
**********
"Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day."
Ray Bradbury
**********
"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You cannot try to do things. You simply must do things."
Ray Bradbury
**********
"Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist."
Robert Browning
**********
"A definition is the enclosing of a wilderness of idea within a wall of words."
Samuel Butler
**********
"At the beginning of any writing project is the agonizing period in which nebulous ideas dance before the mind's eye like memories of a dream, and vaporous vague shapes take on human form and begin to answer to their names."
James Cameron
**********
“Those who write clearly have readers, those who write
obscurely have commentators.”
Albert Camus
*********
”Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any."
Orson Scott Card
**********
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward."
Lewis Carroll
**********
"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them."
Raymond Chandler
**********
"The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony."
John Cheever
**********
"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."
Jean Cocteau
**********
"Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
Colette
**********
"My task…is to make you hear, to make you feel - and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything."
Joseph Conrad
**********
"Art, at its best, is a sweet affirmation of life and a bold defiance of death."
Richard Corliss
**********
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
Bill Cosby
*********
"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon."
Robert Cromier
**********
"Change should be a friend. It should happen by plan, not by
accident."
Phil Crosby
**********
"Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
e. e. cummings
**********
"Your goal should be out of reach, not out of sight."
Anita DeFrantz
**********
“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”
Peter De Vries
**********
"Pause you who read this, and think a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns of flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."
Charles Dickens
*********
"Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have
devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest."
Charles Dickens
**********
"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
Walt Disney
**********
"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
Will Durant
**********
“It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity.”
Albert Einstein
**********
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
Albert Einstein
**********
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
Albert Einstein
**********
“Every new writer is but a new crater of an old volcano."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
**********
"There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
**********
"Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level."
Enrico Fermi
*********
"The tale is often wiser than the teller."
Susan Fletcher
**********
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
Anne Frank
**********
"To give off light, one must endure burning."
Viktor Frank
**********
"The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in."
Harold Goddard
**********
"I read part of a book, all the way through."
Samuel Goldwyn
**********
"When other people define your game for you, they are likely to define it incorrectly."
Kim Goodwin, Running with Bulls
**********
One of the least impressive liberties is the liberty to starve. This particular liberty is freely accorded to authors."
Lord Goodman
**********
"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation."
Graham Greene
**********
"The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments."
Thich Nhat Hanh
**********
“Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start."
Ernest Hemingway, to Arthur Mizener, 1950
**********
"Have been very hard on this book. She pretty near over. All that remains now is to perform the unperformable miracle you have to always do at the end."
Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish, 1936
**********
"Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four."
Katharine Hepburn
**********
"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
Alfred Hitchcock
**********
"If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience."
Victoria Holt
**********
"Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art."
William Ralph Inge
**********
"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
Henry James
**********
"Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action."
William James
**********
"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude of mind."
William James
**********
"As a writer, I don't think it's my responsibility to make a point. I just write and hope there's someone who'll like it."
Tama Janowitz
**********
"The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
Samuel Johnson
**********
"Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords."
Samuel Johnson
**********
"Don't compromise yourself; you're all you've got."
Janis Joplin
*********
"If I live I ought to speak my mind."
Benjamin Jowett
**********
"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by a singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance."
John Keats
**********
"My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time."
Garrison Keillor
**********
"You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble. You may not win right away, but you'll sure have a lot more fun."
Florynce Kennedy
**********
"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."
Martin Luther King
**********
"A good many young writers make the mistake of including a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor."
Ring Lardner
*********
"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
John Lennon
**********
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
James Madison
**********
"If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it."
Thomas Mann
**********
"If there is a secret to writing, I haven't found it yet. All I know is sit down, clear your mind, and hang in there."
Mary McGrory
**********
"When in doubt, sing loud."
Robert Merrill
**********
"When a man becomes fully conscious of his powers, his role, his destiny, he's an artist and he ceases his struggle with reality. Thus, he is enabled to play the monstrous role off living and dying innumerable times according to the measure of his capacity for life."
Henry Miller
**********
"Blessed are the cracked, for they let the light through."
Spike Milligan
**********
"When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you."
Brian Moore
**********
"I get the solid shape, as it were, inside my head…I identify myself with the center of its gravity, its mass, its weight…imagine it any size I like and really am in control almost like God creating something."
Henry Moore
**********
"The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense - which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance."
Vladimir Nabokov
**********
"God made man because he loves stories."
Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlev
**********
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
Anais Nin
*********
"You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him."
Flannery O'Connor
**********
"A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is."
Flannery O'Connor
*********
"Perhaps in their small way, writers can answer for those who are voiceless in their extreme deprivation and suffering. But at best, in the very smallest scheme, writing can provide a moment of grace, both for she who writes and he who reads, in a very dark world...."
Cecile Pineda
**********
"I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it."
Edgar Allan Poe
**********
"You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experiences, from which each according to his immediate needs may draw his own conclusions."
Ezra Pound
**********
"I have always believed helping your fellow man is profitable
in every sense, personally and bottom line."
Mario Puzo
**********
"Luck and strength go together. When you get lucky, you have to have the strength to follow through. You also have to have the strength to wait for the luck."
Mario Puzo
**********
"Failure - no, I shouldn't say "failure," rather, the "lack of success" never frightened me. Even if this book never sold or caught any attention, it would still be the same book."
Arundhati Roy
**********
"If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things."
Taigu Ryokan
**********
"I force myself to write that first draft and call it a 'vomit pass,' just so I won't be precious about it."
M. Night Shyamalan
**********
"I love my stories being multi-layered, and coming at it from different angles, so that you don't understand the film's true emotional motivation until the very end. It isn't about a plot reveal but the true emotional expression at the end of the picture."
M. Night Shyamalan
**********
"All change, all production and generation are effected through the word."
Leopold Sedar Senghor
**********
"O, for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention."
William Shakespeare, Henry V
**********
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's newfangled mirth
But life of each thing that in season grows
William Shakespeare
**********
Biting my truant pen,
eating myself for spite:
"Fool!" said my Muse to me,
"look in thy heart and write"
Philip Sidney
**********
“The waste basket is a writer's best friend."
Isaac Singer
**********
"I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances, from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
**********
"I'm astounded by people who take eighteen years to write something. That's how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary, and was that ever on the best-seller list?"
Sylvester Stallone
**********
"It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing."
Gertrude Stein
**********
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."
William Styron
**********
“Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic."
Jim Trelease
**********
"The only people who should use the possessive “we” are kings, newspaper editors, and persons with tapeworms."
Mark Twain
**********
"Write without pay until somebody offers to pay."
Mark Twain
**********
"It is better to resist at the beginning than at the end."
Leonardo da Vinci
**********
"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
Kurt Vonnegut
**********
"Stories tell us of what we already knew and forgot, and remind us of what we haven’t yet imagined."
Anne L. Watson
**********
“The story and its analyses are not mirror-opposites of each other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what the writer is learning to do.”
Eudora Welty
**********
"Irony in writing is a technique for increasing reader self-approval."
Jessamyn West
**********
"After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others."
Edith Wharton
**********
"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal."
Oscar Wilde
**********
"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."
Oscar Wilde
*********
“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.”
Tennessee Williams
**********
"One of your first jobs, as you write for money, will be to get rid of your vocabulary."
Jack Woodford
**********
"No creative writer can swallow another contemporary. The reception of living work is too coarse and partial if you’re doing the same thing yourself."
Virginia Woolf
**********
“The best way to find out about poetry is to read poems because the reader finds himself subject of its energy”
Louis Zukofsky