Writers on Writing...

Welcome to the month of August...now this is with all the love from Bookaholic Blog :-) More stories...more smiles...more laughter...more dances. Have a great month...one filled with many August visitors with blessings :-)

Here's a compilation of some writers' words on writing.

"...every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen; this, in a certain degree even to all persons, however wise and pure may be their lives, and however unvitiated their taste"

                                                    William Wordsworth

"Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, eventhough he may not have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is absolutely indispensable t o him; his accurate power of examining and embodifying human character and human passion as well as the external face of nature, is not less essential; and the talent of describing what he feels with acuteness, added to the above requisites, goes far to complete the poetic character." 

Sir Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists

"I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not cleat, all my world crumbles to nothing." 

Stendhal to Balzac

"You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. Ideas come very easily to you, incessantly, like a stream. With me, it is a tiny thread of water. Hard labour at art is necessary for me before obtaining a waterfall. Ah I certainly know the agonies of style." 

Gustave Flaubert

"The most important thing in a work of art is that it should have a focus, i.e. there should be some place where all the rays meet or from which they issue. And this focus must not be completely explainable in words. This indeed is one of the significant facts about a true work of art--that its content in its entirety can be expressed." only by itself. "

Leo Tolstoi

Selected from Writers on Writing, compiled and edited by Walter Allen. Buy the book here.