Fannie Hurst Quotations

It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to.

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

Few enjoy noisy overcrowded functions. But they are a gesture of goodwill on the part of host or hostess, and also on the part of guests who submit to them.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

[Wishing her mother had named her Beulah:] At least you did not sit on your beulah.

The grand canyon which yawns between the writer's concept of what he wants to capture in words and what comes through is a cruel abyss.

The literary wiseacres prognosticate in many languages, as they have throughout so many centuries, setting the stage for new hautmonde in letters and making up the public's mind.

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

Oh - oh, why is it that the members of a family feel privileged to treat one another with a cruelty they would not exhibit to the merest stranger?

Family. A snug kind of word.

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.

The maimed bodies aren't the worst. That's the easy way to hate war. The safe way. I - hate it just as much for the maimed souls that stay at home ...

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.

The creative writer is usually captive to his next book.

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.

Any work of art ... is great when it makes you feel that its creator has dipped into your very heart for his sensation.

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

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

Isn't success ridiculously easy, once it begins to succeed? ... after the strain and sweat and pushing until the very groins of your being shrieked protest, something like momentum happened. It took your wits and your concentration and your continued willing sweat, of course, to keep it going, but the success of success had ball bearings.

The vast army of women seeking divorce are mainly after easy alimony from men they have ceased to love - surely one of the most despicable forms of barter that can exchange human hands.

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.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

Art transcends war. Art is the language of God and war is the barking of men. Beethoven is bigger than war.

I would rather regret what I have done than what I have not.