39 Quotes by Fannie Hurst

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.