Frederic Chopin Quotes

My hunger is always there.

I feel just as hungry today as I did the day I left home.

You may write twenty lines one day--or even three like Euripides in three days--and a hundred lines in one more day--and yet on the hundred, may have been expended as much good work, as on the twenty and the three.

Dummy, dummy, go out now and fill your tummy.

You get no thanks from your belly-it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.

A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time

I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.

Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel that will help preserve your balance. Exhaustion will affect both your writing’s quality and your productivity.

If thou rise with an Appetite, thou art sure never to sit down without one.

I'm not a speed writer. I write slowly and revise obsessively. The end result tends to be good. That's where my strength is.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

I have a very healthy appetite for good writing and good characters. Having weak writing is my biggest fear.

I think I could eat one of Bellamy's veal pies.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

All things require skill but an appetite.

Delay is a bitter tonic, but it increases appetite.