? Writers’ Quotes:
“If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.”
“Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.”
“I am not a slow writer, I am not a fast writer . . . I am a half-fast writer.”
“Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, ‘Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!’”
“In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.”
“The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody; in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.”
“A writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”
“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
“Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.”
“I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush,
What set me off a-writing first of all.
An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang!”
“Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.”
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing . . . I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
“I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn’t fulfill something in me, if I don’t honestly feel it’s the best I can do, then I’m miserable.”
“The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
“It’s perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.”
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
“Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.”
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
“Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.”
“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”
“What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.”
“Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.”
“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves.
Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.”
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
“More than kisses, letters mingle souls.”
“Start early and work hard. A writer’s apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he’s almost ready to begin. That takes a while.”
“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
“What lies behind us and lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us.”
“Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.”
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say.”
“Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.”
“Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.”
“Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.”
“Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”
“The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.”
“The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.”
“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”
“A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
“Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.”
“The demonic paradox of writing: when you put something down that happened, people often don’t believe it; whereas you can make up anything, and people assume it must have happened to you.”
“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”
“It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair.”
“Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.”
“Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.”
“Half my life is an act of revision.”
“Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
“There is no perfect time to write. There’s only now.”
“I like to write when I feel spiteful; it’s like having a good sneeze.”
“When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can sure it but the scratching of a pen.”
“Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”
“From the moment I picked you book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”
“In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.”
“Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life.”
“After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.”
“That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.”
“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.”
“I always do the first line well, but have trouble with doing the others.”
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
“There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
“The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.”
“Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.”
“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”
“To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.”
“The trade of authorship is a violent and indestructible obsession.”
“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”
“When I was a young boy, they called me a liar. Now that I’m all grown up, they call me a writer.”
“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
“It is with words as with sunbeams—the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”
“The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
“What’s this business of being a writer. It’s just putting one word after another.”
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug.”
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
“Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.”
“One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.”
“I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.”
“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”
“I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.”
“Biography lends to death a new terror.”
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”
“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”
“I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.”
“What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”