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A day which passed without a poem from my pen I considered lost and misused.
Sep 10, 2025
I have put my pen at the service of some of the most persecuted and misunderstood people in the world. So far as I know nothing of the kind has ever been attempted before in fiction.
With taxes, if they aren't working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It's basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results.
What pen can describe this scene of marvellous horror; what pencil can portray it?
Noise pollution is a relative thing. In a city, it's a jet plane taking off. In a monastery, it's a pen that scratches.
There's something about working in adverse conditions. It keeps it interesting. I always notice if I ever sit down with a pen and piece of paper and a guitar, and I have a beverage and an ashtray and I'm comfortable on the couch, I fall asleep.
You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.
My mind's my 9, my pen's my Mac-10. My target? All you wack niggaz who started rappin'.
Rebecca [West] can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.
A good writer writes with a camera, not a pen.
Oh God, I say not hear my prayers! I say: Blot with forgiving pen my sins away!
God writes with a pen that never blots, speaks with a tongue that never slips, acts with a hand that never fails
There is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.
The first thing that editor does is they take out a red pen, or nowadays you go online, and they start striking things. Basically eliminating things, the biggest task of an editor is to simplify, simplify, simplify and that usually means omitting things.
But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
When you bring in multi-brand retail items into the country, you're not just bringing the products, but you're also harming local manufacturers. You must strengthen your manufacturing sector and put it on a level playing field with the world. Any kind of items manufactured globally, like small pens, pencils, notebooks - our manufactured goods need to be on a level playing field. Then let them come. Have a competition.
When I started writing, I didn't have the common sense to use a pseudonym, so I write under my own name. If I did have a pen name, though, it would be something very historical - something that sounds very sort of Regency... Sophia something.
Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.
The living Church of the redeemed is his book. He founded a religion of the living spirit, not of a written code, like the Mosaic law. Yet his words and deeds are recorded by as honest and reliable witnesses as ever put pen to paper.
We have Trumpist (ph) tendencies in Europe. Look up Marine Le Pen in France. Look at the Five Star Movement headed by a clown by profession, Beppe Grillo, in Italy.
Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good for the soul," he told them. "So we will start with these studies.
I do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill. I have never been so hungry that I willed hunger. I have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen. Not really. Even as a woman, as a Palestinian, as a broken human being. Never this broken.
I see [my pen] as an extension of my musculature. It's like being a painter. It's the closest I can get to my breath.
Set an intention to heal any unexpressed anger that may be present in your life. Go to a quiet place with pen and paper. Take a few deep breaths. Ask your anger to speak to you. Write down the thoughts and feelings. When you are finished, forgive yourself for holding on to the anger for so long.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows; And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.
As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.
I read an interview with Daniel Woodrell once where he said something like, basically, if people had said what they said to him in a bar instead of workshop, he would have punched them...and I finally understood that when in a class with my wife. Every time someone said something about her work, I wanted to climb across the table and stab them in the neck with my pen. And these were people I liked and respected.
Pen in Barack Obama hands is far more dangerous than any other president, at least in modern history, if not ever.
He [Barack Obama] might have a pen, and he might have a phone, but what he does not have is the constitutional power to run this country like a dictator.
The unhappy man, who once has trail'd a pen, Lives not to please himself, but other men; Is always drudging, wastes his life and blood, Yet only eats and drinks what you think good.
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Sometimes, the best songs are the ones you write without any pen and paper or audio recording device or guitar in your hands. Because there's nothing between you and the melody; it's just a great lyric.
We have so much access to video and audio recording equipment that it's kind of the new pen and paper.
Art is the child of Nature; yes, Her darling child, in whom we trace The features of the mother's face, Her aspect and her attitude, All her majestic loveliness Chastened and softened and subdued Into a more attractive grace, And with a human sense imbued. He is the greatest artist, then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who follows Nature.
I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill
I am the author of my life. Unfortunately, I am writing in pen and can’t erase my mistakes.
I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.
I smoke too much whether it's going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
The incessant driving of the pen over paper causes intense fatigue of the hand and the whole arm because of the continuous ... strain on the muscles and tendons.
You've got to find a difierent approach. You've got to create some interest in your language, in the words and pictures you create. If a candidate can't give a 10-minute speech and have reporters reaching for their pens in the first 90 seconds, he probably shouldn't be running.
I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.
But the most annoying of all public reformers is the personal satirist. Though he may be considered by some few as a useful member of society, yet he is only ranked with the hangman, whom we tolerate because he executes the judgment we abhor to do ourselves, and avoid with a natural detestation of his office. The pen of the one and the cord of the other are inseparable in our minds.
I've never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it [animation drawing].
The thing that should most concern us is a shift in American foreign policy. We have had a bipartisan belief in American foreign policy based on the post-World War II institutions that believed in democratic global world, which Russia and the Soviet Union was often seen as hostile to. And most Republicans and Democrats have always basically believed in this world order. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and maybe Marine Le Pen do not agree with this basic structure of the world.
It is much, much worse to receive bad news through the written word than by somebody simply telling you, and I’m sure you understand why. When somebody simply tells you bad news, you hear it once, and that’s the end of it. But when bad news is written down, whether in a letter or a newspaper or on your arm in felt tip pen, each time you read it, you feel as if you are receiving the bad news again and again.
Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour.
I have suffered, like other writers, from indolence, irresolution, distaste to my work, absence of 'inspiration,' and all that: but I have also found that sitting down, however reluctantly, with the pen in my hand, I have never worked for one quarter of an hour without finding myself in full train.
There is a movement happening, a quiet one. A low-profile, low-resolution revolution. Comprised of writers and dreamers, of guerrilla artists and thought-ninjas. Those with something to say. They communicate through text inscribed on true public spaces, rather than blogs and forums. Choosing fewer words, even without being bound by 140 character limits. Using ink instead of pixels. Sending messages in living, breathing space. Pens scream louder into the void. Even if permanent ink is not aptly named.