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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
Writer
Help
Helping
Cannot
Compulsion

More quotes by Edna Ferber

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I'm tired of hearing you men say that this and that and the other isn't woman's work. Any work is woman's work that a woman can do well.
Edna Ferber
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Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.
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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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Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.
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here in Texas maybe we've got into the habit of confusing bigness with greatness.
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Living the past is a dull and lonely business looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
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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Now gae your wa'sTho'anes as gude As ever happit flesh and blude, Yet part we maunthe case sae hard is, Amang the writers and the bardies That lang they'll brook the auld I trow, Or neibours cry,'Weel brook the new'.
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
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don't you hate people who say they're not complaining and then complain?
Edna Ferber
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But almost any place is Baghdad if you don't know what will happen in it.
Edna Ferber
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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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Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.
Edna Ferber
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A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it's ready to serve.
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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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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The very rich and the very social are, often, the very stuffy.
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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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