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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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"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."
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while."
"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."
"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."
"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
"The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more."
"If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be."
Explore more quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers
"Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age."
"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."
"Philip wasn't the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion. I gave him that. I did, you know. But I couldn't stand being made a fool of. I couldn;t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn't believe in marriage -- and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn't. I didn't like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize."
"Salcombe Hardy groaned: "How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee."
"(One character on another:) "Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?"
"And upon his return, Gherkins, who had always considered his uncle as a very top-hatted sort of person, actually saw him take from his handkerchief-drawer an undeniable automatic pistol.It was at this point that Lord Peter was apotheosed from the state of Quite Decent Uncle to that of Glorified Uncle."
"If God made everything, did He make the Devil?' This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents' Manual. Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered."
"This is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also."
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