"I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing."

Writing,

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"I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing."

Exlpore more Writing quotes

"The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Writing, Practice, Observation, Exercise

"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

Explore more quotes by George Woodcock

"I believe in that connection between freedom and the city."

Connection

"When you act dramatically in that way it often has a consequence that is very negative."

Negative

"I was unpopular at school just because I was an intellectual. I always answered all the questions off the top of my head but they nevertheless resented because of that."

Question

"I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something."

People

"I began even as a boy to realize how wide the world can be for a man of free intelligence."

Intelligence

"It even has the same phraseology as the English orders of knighthood, companions and this sort of thing."

Honor

"You can be bound by physical things, as I am by certain sicknesses, but nevertheless you can still be free to recognize that all initiatives really come from yourself if you don't depend upon structures of government or structures of any kind."

Government

"My early wounds were the English school system among other things. It wasn't merely the discipline, it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit."

Discipline

"I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary."

Compromise

"I was allowed to wander where I could. Here is a case in which you search for your independence and allow something creative to come out of that."

Independence