Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About Writing
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When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.
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No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.
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The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.
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I hate to write, but I love to have written.
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It takes hard writing to make easy reading.
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When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.
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I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.
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The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
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All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.
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Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.
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Do not write merely to be understood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood.
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If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.
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The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.
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The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.
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I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.
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Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.
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