A Quote by Ben Jonson

Who casts to write a living line, must sweat. — © Ben Jonson
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.
False casting for practice is the best way to achieve the feel of the line in the air, but in actual fishing, false casts should be limited in number to absolute necessity. In the first place, the more false casts you make, the greater are the chances for the fish to see your arm waving, or the line in the air. And the greater are your chances to make a mistake in the cast and lose your timing. Most anglers, especially tyros, false cast too often. Three false casts should be sufficient for any throw and two is better. One is perfect.
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!
I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.
We must know the difference between sweat and tears. Sweat is wet. Tears are wet. Sweat is salty. Tears are salty. But progress comes through sweat. Progress never came through tears.
The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
To sweat is to pray, to make an offering of your innermost self. Sweat is holy water, prayer beads, pearls of liquid that release your past. Sweat is an ancient and universal form of self healing, whether done in the gym, the sauna, or the sweat lodge. I do it on the dance floor. The more you dance, the more you sweat. The more you sweat, the more you pray. The more you pray, the closer you come to ecstasy.
Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.
You can sweat by not practicing or you can pick up your clarinet. There's good sweat and there's bad sweat.
If you write a good line, you write a good line, and the best line wins in television. It doesn't matter if you're the guy who gets the coffee or if you're the showrunner - best line wins. That's the beauty of television collaboration.
The Lord casts no one down in Hell, but the spirit casts himself hither.
A romp in the hay lingers like the first line of a song, but your true love is the one you make a life with and write more than a line about, you write a whole book.
Sometimes I sit down and write, but I can write in my head line by line.
I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.
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