42 Things You May Not Expect to Hear From Legendary Authors | The Odyssey Online
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42 Things You May Not Expect to Hear From Legendary Authors

Everything they wrote, they wrote gracefully.

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42 Things You May Not Expect to Hear From Legendary Authors
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1. "Every savage can dance." - Jane Austen

 
2. "Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men." - Joseph Conrad

3. "Four legs good, two legs bad." - George Orwell

4. "There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity." - Vladimir Nabokov

5. "Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why." - James Joyce

6. "I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect." - Henry James

7. “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” - William Faulkner

8. "Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals." - John Steinbeck

9. "At fifty everyone has the face he deserves." - George Orwell

10. "Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal." - Leo Tolstoy

11. "Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips." - Charles Dickens

12. "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." - Ray Bradbury

13. "I don't like allegories." - J.R.R. Tolkien

14. "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." - Jane Austen

15. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway

16. "My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions." - James Joyce

17. "Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

18. "People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." - Isaac Asimov

19. "Women desire six things: They want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, generous, obedient to wife, and lively in bed." - Geoffrey Chaucer

20. "An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex." - Aldous Huxley

21. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - George Orwell

22. "I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them." - Henry James

23. "So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being." - Franz Kafka

24. "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?" - Ernest Hemingway

25. "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please." - Mark Twain

26. "If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it." - Ray Bradbury

27. “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.” - William Faulkner

28. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - George Orwell

29. "He would make a lovely corpse." - Charles Dickens

30. "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." - Ernest Hemingway

31. "When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the human race." - H.G. Wells

32. "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." - Herman Melville

33. “If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.” - Phillip K. Dick

34. "Filth and old age, I'm sure you will agree, are powerful wardens upon chastity." - Geoffrey Chaucer

35. "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams

36. "The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

37. "Life is a predicament which precedes death." - Henry James

38. "I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great." - Ray Bradbury

39. "If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers." - Charles Dickens
40. "Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." - Mark Twain

41. "I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man." - George Orwell

42. “Pouring out liquor is like burning books.” - William Faulkner

Rule #1 of being a writer: Books & alcohol have equal rights.

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