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Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.

Gertrude Atherton

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Gertrude Atherton
Age: 90 †
Born: 1858
Born: January 14
Died: 1948
Died: June 14
Author
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Gertrude Franklin Atherton
Asmodeus
Frank Lin
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
Long
Hours
Desk
Simple
Desks
Whether
Intention
Three
Accomplish
Anything
Begin
Find
Inspiration
Madly
Writing
Morning
Recipe
Every
Waiting
Recipes

More quotes by Gertrude Atherton

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The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.
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Plot and melodrama were in every life in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.
Gertrude Atherton
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orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.
Gertrude Atherton
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The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.
Gertrude Atherton
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the best of all good friends is pride.
Gertrude Atherton
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fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.
Gertrude Atherton
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The very commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery.
Gertrude Atherton
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Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.
Gertrude Atherton
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A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.
Gertrude Atherton
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Men are not amusing during the shooting season but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.
Gertrude Atherton
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the curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.
Gertrude Atherton
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The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.
Gertrude Atherton
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there is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.
Gertrude Atherton
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I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.
Gertrude Atherton
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It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.
Gertrude Atherton
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It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the 'ancestral piles' of England.
Gertrude Atherton
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... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.
Gertrude Atherton
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It took me some time to learn that although every one secretly cherishes the ambition to be 'put in a book,' no one is ever satisfied with anything save incense, butter, and honey, unrelieved by salt or spice.
Gertrude Atherton
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Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.
Gertrude Atherton
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The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.
Gertrude Atherton