Left Hand Writing Quotes & Sayings

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. — Zadie Smith

There is always some sleight of hand going on in writing autobiography. So much has to be left out, especially things that might hurt or dismay people. But in a novel one can say everything. The novel is often autobiography distilled and / or transcended. — May Sarton

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like
what's going on
what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness] — Ursula K. Le Guin

I peered at his writing, but I could make nothing of it.
Then I saw why, and my soul chilled like marble.
His writing was running left to right. Not the words in reverse order, but the letter themselves. All of it. It was mirror writing- to be read by the Devil. — Theresa Breslin

Got that gun?" Peter says to Tobias. "No," says Tobias, "I figured I would shoot the bullets out of my nostrils, so I left it upstairs. — Veronica Roth

Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. — Anna Kamienska

The R is the wrong way roond and you left the A and a Y out of Anybody,' said Jeannie, because it is a wife's job to stop her husband actually exploding with pride.
'Ach, wumman, I didna' ken which way the fat man wuz walkin',' said Rob, airly waving a hand. 'Ye canna trust the fat man. That's the kind of thing us nat'ral writin' folk knows about. One day he might walk this way, next day he might walk that way. — Terry Pratchett

I don't think I ever saw Hank with anybody, say, 'Let's go write a song.' One Sunday morning we left Nashville to go to Birmingham to do a matinee and a night, and he said, 'Hand me that tablet up there.' And he wrote down, 'Hey, good lookin', what you got cookin' and before we got to Birmingham it was finished. — Don Helms

Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:
A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'd
By your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shade
Below the garden ...
His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship. — Edward Gorey

Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage. — Leon Uris

Germany is an anatomical oddity: it writes with its left hand and acts with its right. — Kurt Tucholsky

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.
"Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable ... "
"What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh.
"Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity."
"A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously. — P.D. James

I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it. — Ben Okri

To illustrate what a personality preference is, I like to compare it to hand dominance. As we all know, a right-handed person will prefer to use her right hand for the majority of tasks, especially those requiring fine motor skills, such as writing. This of course doesn't mean that she never uses her left hand, but only that it tends to play more of a supportive, rather than a dominant or leading role.
The same is true for our personality preferences. While we may at times use our non-dominant preferences, in most situations we prefer to lead with our dominant ones. Not only does this feel more comfortable and natural, but typically produces better results. — A.J. Drenth

I could give you absolutely sterling advice on how to avoid writing, how when you run out of things to do other than going to your desk and writing, when every closet is reorganized and you've called your oldest living relative twice in one day to see what she's up to and there isn't an unanswered e-mail left on your computer or you simply can't bear to answer another one and there is no dignity, not a drop left, in any further evasion of the task at hand, namely writing, well, you can always ask your dentist for a root canal or have an accident in the bathtub instead. — Tony Kushner

'Catcher in the Rye.' I feel like any brooding teen loves that book. — Justice Smith

Arguably, horror may be understood as a fictional indulgence in fantasies of violence, and our fascination with it seen as a form of sublimation of repressed desires. If we accept this line of thinking, then horror has the benefit of, at least, being one of the most honest of genres. — Xavier Aldana Reyes

About your writing with you left hand, are you ambidextrous, Mr. Ewell?"
"I most positively am not, I can use one hand good as the other. One hand good as the other. — Harper Lee

They're just clothes,' she remembered writing down in the leafy, thin pages of her journal. 'And the warmth of them no longer comforts you nor belongs to you. They're just fabric without an owner. A familiarity that has faded and an attachment that no longer has a name, just a brand mark stitched into the seams.' She remembered her hand flowing quickly and purposefully across the page as her eyes shifted from the journal to the sweater to the journal again.
'And when I slip them over my head. I smell not your fragrance and feel no longer the emptiness you left behind. I see me in a mirror, with a sweater on. And I look as radiant and beautiful, and broken, and whole, and relentlessly happy as you left me. — Adriana Rodrigues

Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist — Robert Charles Wilson

This manner of writing wherein knowing myself inferior to myself? I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand. — John Milton

An acquaintance of mine, a notary by profession, who, by perpetual writing, began first to complain of an excessive wariness of his whole right arm which could be removed by no medicines, and which was at last succeeded by a perfect palsy of the whole arm ... He learned to write with his left hand, which was soon thereafter seized with the same disorder. — Bernardino Ramazzini

Nothing in the world was as beautiful to me as that tattoo, except the man bearing it. — S.C. Stephens

Lately, I usually write at the desk in my living-room or bedroom. From time to time, our red and stripy cat named Foxy decides to be my companion, poking his curious caramel-colored nose to the screen, watching me typing, and making attempts to put his paws on the keyboard despite the fact that he knows he is not allowed to; he also loves to arrange "sunbathing sessions for himself, purring joyfully while lying with his belly up under the lamp placed to the left of my computer; and, of course, the cat can't wait for when I happen to have a snack, to beg for some treats that seem to him tastiest if eaten from a caring human's hand. — Sahara Sanders

I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing. — Rebecca West

When I write in Italian - this is just the metaphor that came to me immediately, and I really think this is what it is - I feel like I'm writing with my left hand. Because of that weakness, there is this enormous freedom that comes with it. — Jhumpa Lahiri

trying to convince myself
i am allowed
to take up space
is like writing with
my left hand
when i was born
to use my right

-the idea shrinking is hereditary — Rupi Kaur

To think well is to serve God in the interior court. — Thomas Traherne

The return of the Independent Bookstore is the answer to the stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap megastores. — Kambiz Mostofizadeh

According to St. Augustine, the left hand represented the temporal, the mortal, and the bodily, as opposed to the right, which stood for "God, eternity, the years of God which fail not."25 For centuries the preference for the right hand over the left governed how people fished, ploughed fields, twisted rope, and ate their meals. The Greeks and Romans, for example, always reclined on the left side, propped on the left elbow, leaving the right hand free for the business of eating and drinking. Plutarch noted that parents taught children to eat right-handed from a young age, and "if they do put forth the left hand, at once we correct them."26 The prejudice against the left hand persisted during the Renaissance, with parents freeing a child's right hand from its swaddling clothes to ensure right-handedness at the dinner table as well as at the writing desk. — Ross King

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. — Margaret Atwood