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Writing Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
- The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
- Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
- A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
- I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
- The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
- Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and…
- The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed…
- Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from…
- Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
- My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
- Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at…
- No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I…
- The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
- The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
- Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.
- a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that…
- My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest…
- The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows…
- I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. — Isaac Asimov
- Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. — Isaac Asimov