A Quote by Flannery O'Connor

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

Flannery O'Connor

Quote Topics

Hardest How Never Succumb Understand Vanity Work Worst Writers

Quote Author

Flannery O'Connor
American - Novelist
March 25, 1925 - August 3, 1964

I read continually and don't understand writers who say they don't read while working on a book. For a start, a book takes me about two years to write, so there's no way I am depriving myself of reading during that time. Another thing is that reading other writers is continually inspiring - reading great writers reminds you how hard you have to work.

Paul Lynch

I want to be the band everyone knows that goes hardest. Plays the hardest, parties the hardest, lives the hardest, loves the hardest, does everything the hardest, harder than anybody else.

Austin Carlile

You ought to run the hardest when you feel the worst. Never let the other guy know you're down.

Joe DiMaggio

We sort of understand how painkillers work. You take one, and it reduces your headache. We don't understand how photographs work. And that, to me, is an essential problem as a practitioner.

Stuart Franklin

Read as much as possible, especially the work of writers who most deeply affect you. Make those writers your family. Never wait for inspiration to strike before getting to work; be disciplined and form the habit of writing every day.

Sigrid Nunez

I think sometimes the hardest obstacle is yourself. I can certainly be my own worst critic and oftentimes forget to enjoy the here and now. Physically, the hardest obstacle I have overcome was severe back issues. [This] resulted in finally getting surgery to replace four discs, which changed my life back to active - which is how I am happiest.

Tricia Helfer

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Neil Gaiman

We never know about anybody else's relationship and how they work - particularly the ones that work for a really, really long time. I was going to say only the people in it, but often, not even they understand how it works.

Tilda Swinton

Love is hard work. It is the hardest work I know of, work from which you are never entitled to take a vacation.

Ravi Zacharias

If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity. But I mean by vanity only that they appreciate their own worth. Without this kind of vanity they would not be great. And with vanity alone, of course, a man is nothing.

Yousuf Karsh

That’s always the hardest thing when someone completely has you fooled so much, that you think they’re just never going to hurt you, then they do. That’s when you get the worst heartbreak.

Taylor Swift

I understand that each one of us works at a different speed, and has a slightly different process. I understand that these writers are painstaking, wanting each sentence-each word-to carry weight... I know it’s not laziness, but respect for the work, and I understand from my own work that haste makes waste. But I also understand that life is short, and that in the end, none of us is prolific. The creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn’t produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell.

Stephen King

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.