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Writers on Writing

This part is just for fun!  I love these quotes about writing from some of my favorite authors.  They give me inspiration for my own work, and might give you some pause regarding the difficulty of the discipline.  The masters struggle through every sentence.  If you think writing is easy, you should probably hire someone who thinks it's difficult to do it for you.

Cormac McCarthy

‘Writing is rewriting."– Cormac McCarthy, 2007 Rolling Stone Interview

Margaret Atwood

"A word after a word after a word is power."-Margaret Atwood

Ferdinand de Saussure

“Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.”- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

Flannery O'Connor

"I write to discover what I know."-Flannery O'Connor

James Baldwin

"You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal."-James Baldwin, 1984 interview in The Paris Review

Toni Morrison

"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."-Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Thomas Jefferson

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
-Thomas Jefferson

Ernest Hemmingway

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
-Ernest Hemingway

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