Quotes about 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
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"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
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"The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man."

Algren, Nelson on writers and writing   

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

Anderson, Margaret on writers and writing
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"To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do."

Aristotle on writers and writing
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"If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."

Asimov, Isaac on writers and writing
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"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
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"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
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"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."

Bach, Richard on writers and writing
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"A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream."

Bachelard, Gaston on writers and writing
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"Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders."

Bagehot, Walter on writers and writing
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"Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To Why am I here? To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus."

Bagnold, Enid on writers and writing
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"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

Baldwin, James on writers and writing
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"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
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"To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak, is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence, the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mystical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. For I cannot but ascribe to some superhumanly the existence of beings vast enough to wear blue pajamas at the very moment when they manifest themselves as universal conscience."

Barthes, Roland on writers and writing   

"On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox."

Baudelaire, Charles on writers and writing   

"All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac."

Bellow, Saul on writers and writing
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"The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."

Benchley, Robert on writers and writing
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"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous."

Benchley, Robert on writers and writing
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"The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon."

Benchley, Robert on writers and writing
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"Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven."

Benjamin, Walter on writers and writing
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"I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not."

Bennett, Alan on writers and writing   

"Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion."

Bennett, Arnold on writers and writing
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"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."

Berger, Thomas on writers and writing
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"A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it."

Blanchot, Maurice on writers and writing   

"To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence."

Blanchot, Maurice on writers and writing   

"No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write."

Boileau, Nicholas on writers and writing
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"He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write."

Boileau, Nicholas on writers and writing
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"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   

"Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."

Borges, Jorge Luis on writers and writing   

"A book should be luminous not voluminous."

Bovee, Christian Nevell on writers and writing
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"Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them."

Bowen, Catherine Drinker on writers and writing   

"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word."

Bowen, Catherine Drinker on writers and writing
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"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   

"But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame."

Bronte, Charlotte on writers and writing   

"Great writers are the saints for the godless."

Brookner, Anita on writers and writing
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"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him."

Brooks, Mel on writers and writing
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"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
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"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