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If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.

Sherwood Anderson

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Sherwood Anderson
Age: 64 †
Born: 1876
Born: September 13
Died: 1941
Died: March 8
Novelist
Writer
Buck Fever
Fooling
Writer
Stop
Words
Become
Writing

More quotes by Sherwood Anderson

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Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. 'The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two.
Sherwood Anderson
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I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
Sherwood Anderson
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I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.
Sherwood Anderson
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The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.
Sherwood Anderson
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I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.
Sherwood Anderson
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My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a sign-writer.
Sherwood Anderson
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The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Sherwood Anderson
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I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.
Sherwood Anderson
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Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.
Sherwood Anderson
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What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.
Sherwood Anderson
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I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.
Sherwood Anderson
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All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child--something of that sort--gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.
Sherwood Anderson
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Wait and wait. Most people's lives are spent waiting.
Sherwood Anderson
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Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.
Sherwood Anderson
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It is no use. I find it impossible to work with security staring me in the face.
Sherwood Anderson
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The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.
Sherwood Anderson
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There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
Sherwood Anderson
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The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
Sherwood Anderson