Quotes about writers-and-writing

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

— William Faulkner

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

— William Faulkner

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

— William Faulkner

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.

— Edna Ferber

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

— Edna Ferber

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

— Edna Ferber

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

— Edward M. Forster

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

— Gene Fowler

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

— Gene Fowler

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

— Benjamin Franklin

Our work is to present things that are as they are.

— (Frederick II) Frederick The Great

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

— Sigmund Freud

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

— Eduardo Galeano

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

— Edward Gibbon

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

— Edward Gibbon

If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

— William Golding

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

— Ellen Goodman

A writer should be a joyous optimist. Anything that implies rejection of life is wrong for a writer.

— George Gribbon

I don't regard Brecht as a man of iron-gray purpose and intellect, I think he is a theatrical whore of the first quality.

— Sir Peter Hall

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.

— Gail Hamilton

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

— Peter Handke

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

— Vaclav Havel

The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

— William Hazlitt

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

— Lillian Hellman

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

— Lillian Hellman

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

— Ernest Hemingway

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

— Ernest Hemingway

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

— Ernest Hemingway

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

— Ernest Hemingway

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

— Ernest Hemingway

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

— Ernest Hemingway

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

— Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

— Ernest Hemingway

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

— Oliver Herford

The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.

— Horace

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don't labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

— Horace

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

— Horace

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

— Horace

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

— Horace

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

— Horace

The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness.

— Julia Ward Howe

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.

— John K. Hutchens

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

— Washington Irving

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

— Henry James

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

— Henry James

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

— William James

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

— Samuel Johnson

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

— Samuel Johnson

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

— Samuel Johnson

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

— Samuel Johnson

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

— Joseph Joubert

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

— James Joyce

Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

— Ken Kesey

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

— Omar Khayyam

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

— Stephen King

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

— George Konrad

This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.

— Karl Kraus

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

— Karl Kraus

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

— Jean De La Bruyere

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

— Walter Savage Landor

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

— D. H. Lawrence

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

— D. H. Lawrence

It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.

— Jack Lemmon

The cure for writers cramp is writer's block.

— Inigo de Leon

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

— Claude Levi-Strauss

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

— Cecil Day Lewis

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

— A. J. Liebling

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

— Norman Mailer

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

— Norman Mailer

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

— Paul De Man

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

— Paul De Man

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.

— Don Marquis

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.

— Judith Martin

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

— Groucho Marx

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

— Karl Marx

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

— W. Somerset Maugham

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

— W. Somerset Maugham

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

— W. Somerset Maugham

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

— W. Somerset Maugham

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

— Andre Maurois

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

— Ian Mcewan

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

— Larry Mcmurtry

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!

— Herman Melville

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

— H. L. Mencken

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.

— Paul J. Meyer

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

— James A. Michener

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

— James A. Michener

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

— James A. Michener

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in.

— Henry Miller

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

— Henry Miller