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"The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to, surely one can only write the book that is there to be written."
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"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."

"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."

"Authoring a book is the sound of your voice around the world."

"What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes."

"We write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are."

"You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic."

"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."

"It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it."
Explore more quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers

"As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less, Who goes to bed with whom."

"Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject."

"There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks."

"I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson, and you need not say what you were just going to say, because I admit it all."

"Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection."

"I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction "from the woman's point of view. To such demands, one can only say "Go away and don't be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle."

"Every woman is a human being-one cannot repeat that too often-and a human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world."

"I suppose one oughtn't to marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job."Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don't look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures."

"Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."
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