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"Bartlett's" aside, collections of quotations tend to make us sleepy -- how many "Quotations for Mothers of Men Who Meditate Too Much" and "Cat Quotations for Angels in Recovery" do we really need?
Deborah Brodie's new collection is refreshingly relevant, a good book for any writer to keep at hand. Among the pearls from "Writing Changes Everything: The 627 Best Things Anyone Ever Said about Writing":
"When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad things you did do, that's memoirs."
-- Will Rogers, humorist
"Write a verse a day, not to send to publishers, but to throw in waste baskets. It will help your prose. It will give you swing."
-- Dr. Seuss, author and illustrator
"There's a marvelous peace in not being published."
-- J.D. Salinger, novelist and short story writer
"If you're going to do good work, the work has to scare you."
-- Andre Previn, composer and conductor
"I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing -- tightrope walking comes immediately to mind -- but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot."
-- Calvin Trillin, journalist and humorist
"I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars."
-- Fred Allen, humorist
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
-- Elvis Costello, songwriter and rock musician
"I don't ever write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window."
-- Barbara Kingsolver, novelist
"Cut a good story anywhere, and it will bleed."
-- Anton Chekhov, dramatist and short story writer
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."
-- Elmore Leonard, novelist
"Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb."
-- Jane Austen, novelist
"You divert [the reader], then you clobber him."
-- Flannery O'Connor, novelist and short story writer
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