Fannie Hurst Quotes

Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it.

One evening in one of those Over-the-Rhine cafes which were plentiful along Vine Street of the Cincinnati of the nineties, a traveling salesman leaned across his stein of Moerlein's Extra Light and openly accused Ray Schmidt of being innocent.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

Nervous hands as if the fingers were dripping from them like icicles.

Luscious feet that listened to the soil and stole its secrets.

It would be a fallacy to deduce that the slow writer necessarily comes up with superior work. There seems to be scant relationshipbetween prolificness and quality.

Life owes me a living worth living. Yes, Eden regarded life as her debtor, she its relentless paymaster.

Some authors have what amounts to a metaphysical approach. They admit to inspiration. Sudden and unaccountable urgencies to writecatapult them out of sleep and bed. For myself, I have never awakened to jot down an idea that was acceptable the following morning.

I loathe all this blind rushing pell-mell into a struggle arranged by the mighty minority and paid for with the lives of young men who are drugged on trumped-up ideals.

Family. A snug kind of word.

The creative writer is usually captive to his next book.

But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.

A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far.

We dig our graves with our teeth.

A woman is not a whole woman without the experience of marriage. In the case of a bad marriage, you win if you lose. Of the two alternatives - bad marriage or none - I believe bad marriage would be better. It is a bitter experience and a high price to pay for fulfillment, but it is the better alternative.

Crushed to earth and rising again is an author's gymnastic. Once he fails to struggle to his feet and grab his pen, he will contemplate a fact he should never permit himself to face: that in all probability books have been written, are being written, will be written, better than anything he has done, is doing, or will do.

I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.

Charm is an odorless perfume, which cannot be anchored in the chemists' test tube. It is a permeation, a radiation. It emanates from the climate of a warm human spirit, which not only contains light, but gives it off.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.