Quotes about writers and writing

"Writers are the main landmarks of the past."

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G. on writers and writing   

"The pen is mightier than the sword."

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G. on writers and writing   

"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
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"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   

"The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them."

Butler, Samuel on writers and writing
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"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   

"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
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"In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication."

Byron, Lord on writers and writing   

"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 process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation."

Canetti, Elias on writers and writing   

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

Capote, Truman on writers and writing
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"Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness."

Carlyle, Thomas on writers and writing   

"To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies."

Cather, Willa on writers and writing   

"Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values."

Cather, Willa on writers and writing   

"An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought."

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De on writers and writing   

"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   

"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   

"The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony."

Cheever, John on writers and writing   

"Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid."

Churchill, Charles on writers and writing   

"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
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"Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune."

Cicero, Marcus T. on writers and writing   

"The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen."

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle on writers and writing   

"If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!"

Collins, Jackie on writers and writing   

"To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author."

Colton, Charles Caleb on writers and writing   

"The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down."

Colton, Charles Caleb on writers and writing   

"Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say."

Colton, Charles Caleb on writers and writing   

"A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out."

Connolly, Cyril on writers and writing   

"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
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"When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post."

Connolly, Cyril on writers and writing   

"In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable."

Cooley, Charles Horton on writers and writing   

"Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard."

Corbett, James J. on writers and writing   

"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   

"Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth."

Dahlberg, Edward on writers and writing   

"To write is a humiliation."

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   

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

Dahlberg, Edward on writers and writing   

"I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat."

Davies, Robertson 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 isn't hard. It isn't any harder than ditch-digging."

Dennis, Patrick on writers and writing