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"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult."
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"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."

"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."

"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."

"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."

"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."

"An author's operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature."
Explore more quotes by Stephen Leacock

"It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy."

"Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so."

"It takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse. This, however, I have. I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required."

"There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit."

"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it."

"The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine."
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