William Bailey > William's Quotes

“Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Courage is grace under pressure.”
― ernest hemingway

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Isn't it pretty to think so.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”
― Hemingway, Ernest

“In order to write about life first you must live it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“All things truly wicked start from innocence.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet