"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."

Churchill, Winston on writers and writing
7 fans of this quote   

"Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love."

Chandler, Raymond on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness."

Carlyle, Thomas on writers and writing   

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."

Capote, Truman on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Byron, Lord on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence."

Connolly, Cyril on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist."

Crisp, Quentin on writers and writing
4 fans of this quote   

"There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work."

Crowley, Aleister on writers and writing   

"I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence."

Eliot, George on writers and writing   

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

Doctorow, E. L. on writers and writing   

"Writers are always selling somebody out."

Didion, Joan on writers and writing   

"Writing isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging."

Dennis, Patrick on writers and writing   

"The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way."

Davis, Richard Harding on writers and writing   

"Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors."

Dahlberg, Edward on writers and writing   

"What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful."

Dahlberg, Edward on writers and writing   

"To write is a humiliation."

Dahlberg, Edward on writers and writing   

"To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all."

Byron, Lord on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels."

Burgess, Anthony on writers and writing   

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent."

Baldwin, James on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders."

Bagehot, Walter on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted."

Auden, W. H. on writers and writing
4 fans of this quote   

"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about."

Auden, W. H. on writers and writing
8 fans of this quote   

"It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane."

Anderson, Margaret on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal."

Amis, Martin on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name."

Aldiss, Brian on writers and writing
4 fans of this quote   

"Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; -- all this comes of Authorship."

Byron, Lord on writers and writing   

"The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."

Benchley, Robert on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon."

Benchley, Robert on writers and writing
5 fans of this quote   

"Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic."

Burchill, Julie on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author."

Bruyere, Jean De La on writers and writing   

"The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!"

Browning, Robert on writers and writing
6 fans of this quote   

"Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul."

Brodsky, Joseph on writers and writing   

"A book should be luminous not voluminous."

Bovee, Christian Nevell on writers and writing
5 fans of this quote   

"Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned."

Borges, Jorge Luis on writers and writing   

"He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write."

Boileau, Nicholas on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success."

Chandler, Raymond on writers and writing   

"The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born."

Adler, Renata on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live."

Ellman, Lucy on writers and writing   

"The cure for writers cramp is writer's block."

Leon, Inigo de on writers and writing   

"It requires more than mere genius to be an author."

La Bruyere, Jean De on writers and writing