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The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

Edna Ferber

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Edna Ferber
Age: 80 †
Born: 1887
Born: August 15
Died: 1968
Died: April 16
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Appleton
Wisconsin
Cannot
Compulsion
Writer
Help
Helping

More quotes by Edna Ferber

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There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind's wheat and the other kind's emeralds.
Edna Ferber
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But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.
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I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.
Edna Ferber
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Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.
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Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.
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It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.
Edna Ferber
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A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.
Edna Ferber
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People permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse-not yet missed and now too late-in his hand.
Edna Ferber
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... home isn't always the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place where your everyday clothes are, and where somebody or something needs you.
Edna Ferber
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We no longer build fireplaces for physical warmth—we build them for the warmth of the soul we build them to dream by, to hope by, to home by.
Edna Ferber
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writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.
Edna Ferber
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A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.
Edna Ferber
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Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.
Edna Ferber
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You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.
Edna Ferber
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Men often marry their mothers.
Edna Ferber
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No woman ought to pretend she's intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn't.
Edna Ferber
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Christmas is not a season. It is a feeling.
Edna Ferber
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The very rich and the very social are, often, the very stuffy.
Edna Ferber
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Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
Edna Ferber
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To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge -- this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.
Edna Ferber