"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

Writing, Profession

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"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

Exlpore more Writing quotes

"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."

John Steinbeck, American Author

Writing, Loneliness, Communication, Story

"Every writer has to figure out what works best - and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, Tools, Writer

"If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day."

Philip Pullman, British Writer

Writing, Day, Luck

"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, Plagiarism

"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

Blaise Pascal, French Philosopher

Writing, Time

"In the summer of '80, Silhouette bought my first book."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, First, Summer

"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."

Toni Morrison, American Novelist

Writing, World

"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."

John Updike, American Novelist

Writing, May, Writers

"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."

Emily Dickinson, American Poet

Writing, Word, Power, Expression

"Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities."

Vladimir Nabokov, American Novelist

Writing, Ego, Criticism, Success

Explore more quotes by Robert Frost

"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."

Freedom

"You have freedom when you're easy in your harness."

Freedom

"It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage..."

Conflict

"The farm is a base of operations"a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks"when he "comes to market' with himself. He learns that he's got to be almost wastefully alone."

Self-Growth

"Fragmentary BlueWhy make so much of fragmentary blueIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--Though some savants make earth include the sky;And blue so far above us comes so high,It only gives our wish for blue a whet."

Nature

"They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves."

Nature

"If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane."

Humor

"They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars-on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places."

Fear

"You've got to be brave and you've got to be bold. Brave enough to take your chance on your own discrimination - what's right and what's wrong what's good and what's bad."

Courage

"More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts."

Politics