A Quote by Anais Nin

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

Anais Nin

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Book Dictionary Encounter Everything Final Learned Learns Lesson New New Word Nourish Phrase Street Talk Voyage Word Writer

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Anais Nin
American - Novelist
February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

Anais Nin

By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I've examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.

Stephen Sondheim

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

Ambrose Bierce

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Don DeLillo

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

P. L. Travers

writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.

Edna Ferber

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Don DeLillo

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul.

Andre Dubus

I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it.

Lewis Carroll

If a writer doesn't do anything but give a new word to his language and, from there, maybe to other languages, I think that writer redefines the world.

Ilan Stavans

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

Ernest Hemingway

I learned that you have to respect how much time and work a writer has put into their book. I always give the writer I'm publishing a good deal of control in shaping the book and figuring out how it looks, but I'll make suggestions on how to make it stronger.

Kevin Sampsell

One of the most useful parts of my education as a writer was the practice of reading a writer straight through - every book the writer published, in chronological order, to see how the writer changed over time, and to see how the writer's idea of his or her project changed over time, and to see all the writer tried and accomplished or failed to accomplish.

Kyle Minor

I'm very much, like, 'We've all got to help each other.' If there's a new female writer, I'm much more likely to read her book than if it's by a new male writer.

Sarah Pinborough

I don't call myself a writer, much as I'd love to be. An author, maybe - the novel 'Voyage' made $870,000. Writer, no. Nor am I an actor. I was never on the stage.

Sterling Hayden

A Quote by Anais Nin

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