"These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try."

Writing, First, Nothing, Years

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"These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try."

Exlpore more Writing quotes

"You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

Writing, Mystery, Storytelling, Secrets, Skill

"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Writing, Description, Delight, Imagination

"Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Author

Writing, Tragedy

"We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations."

Kilroy J. Oldster, American Author

Writing, Life, Religion, Nature

"I'm a fairly undisciplined writer."

Neil Gaiman, British Author

Writing, Writer

"Writers aren't exactly people, they're a bunch of people trying to be one person."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Author

Writing, Identity, Creativity, People

"My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

John F. Kennedy, American President

Writing, Americans, Country

"Pour your heart onto the page."

A. D. Posey, American Poet

Writing, Emotion, Expression, Creativity

"One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane."

Laurell K. Hamilton, American Writer

Writing, Magic, Rules

"Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal."

Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher

Writing, Error, Effort, Understanding

Explore more quotes by Jacques Derrida

"Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school."

Writing

"I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan."

Life

"I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles."

Argument

"The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages."

Media

"Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture."

Cultural

"Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides."

Writing

"I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner."

Desire

"The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown."

Experience

"No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language."

Language

"In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it."

Dream